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AMBULA 

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ENCORE DES BLESSE 



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AMBULANCE 464" 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

NEW YORK • BOSTON • CHICAGO 
DALLAS • ATLANTA • SAN FRANCISCO 

MACMILLAN & C0. ? Limited 

LONDON • BOMBAY • CALCUTTA 
MELBOURNE 

THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd. 

TORONTO 




The author working on his diary on the front seat of "464' 



cc 



AMBULANCE 464" 

Encore des Blesses 



BY 

JULIEN H. BRYAN 



WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY 

LYMAN ABBOTT 



ILLUSTRATED 



J?eto gorfe 

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

1918 



a 



Copyright, 1918 



BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
Set up and Electrotyped. Published April, 1918 



MAY -9 I 
©CI.A497240 



TO 

MY MOTHER AND FATHER 



PREFACE 

The American Ambulance Field Service was taken 
over by our army in France in October, 19 17, and 
although many of its sections are still serving with 
the French forces it has lost its former identity. A 
few drivers remain, and several hundred have re- 
turned home; but the majority have joined some 
branch of the service with General Pershing's forces. 

This book is an attempt to tell something of my 
own experiences as an ambulance driver with Section 
Twelve, and, at the same time, to give an idea of 
what the ambulance service is doing and will have 
to do probably for some time to come. It is my 
first book and has not been written without consid- 
erable effort, and I might even say sacrifice. Many 
a time last winter I scribbled in my diary until long 
after midnight, seated on a stretcher in my ambu- 
lance, with two kerosene lamps to give a little light 
and warmth. I felt that I had a story to tell in my 
own way, and that, if necessary, I could revise it in 
a comparatively short time upon my return home. 
But the task has not been so easy as I imagined. I 
have spent many hours during the three months I 
have been at Princeton trying to put it into shape, 



viii PREFACE 

and study and drill at the same time. I hope that I 
have succeeded. If I have, it is because I have tried 
to tell as simply as possible a few of the many things 
which happened in our section over there. 

We of the American Ambulance Field Service 
have no desire to pose as heroes. I went over, as 
did so many of the others, with the object of seeing 
war at first hand and of getting some excitement, as 
well as being of some service. But we do not care 
to be talked of as young heroes trying to save France, 
because that was not our idea in going, at any rate 
not at first. But having arrived in France and 
learned of some of the terrible things which had 
been done by the enemy and what the French people 
had gone through, and having become imbued with 
some of the wonderful spirit of the French, our 
point of view was altered, and we were ashamed of 
our primary object in offering our services. More- 
over, we realized on getting to the front that our 
own little section was but a single unit among the 
five million troops constituting the French army, 
and that individually we were very unimportant. 
Nevertheless, I hope w'e did our share in strengthen- 
ing the morale of all those fine fellows with whom 
we came in contact. Seeing us Americans actually in 
the field with them doubtless inspired them with the 
hope that more would be coming over before long 
and they have not been disappointed. 



PREFACE ix 

I regret that I had to return before the war was 
over. I feel that I have gotten out of my work in 
France far more than I put into it. The experience 
and the life did me untold good and when my period 
of enlistment was up I would have stayed on and 
entered the Aviation Service had the decision been 
entirely my own. Family reasons necessitated my 
return home but I hope it will not be long before I 
am again in the field of action. 

In taking the photographs I used a post-card size 
camera, with a good anastigmat lens, and I would 
advise anyone going over with the intention of taking 
pictures not to get a smaller camera, for although 
the larger size is occasionally troublesome, little pic- 
tures are always unsatisfactory. But this advice may 
be unnecessary, because our authorities, like the Brit- 
ish, are very strict concerning the use of cameras 
within the war zone. Almost all our films were de- 
veloped at the front, Gilmore and I using the loft of 
a barn for a laboratory, with buckets and basins for 
apparatus. Many Were the negatives we spoiled 
when the weather was so cold that the developer 
would not act on the films. Sometimes we printed by 
sunlight and sometimes by means of the carbide 
headlights on one of the cars. I took about four 
hundred photographs altogether, and the best which 
survive are in this book. I have also used a number 
of pictures taken by my friends, and wish to thank 



x PREFACE 

them for their kindness in giving me permission to 
do this. William Gilmore and Ray Williams, both 
of Section Twelve, supplied three and four, respec- 
tively, the latter number including the balloon pic- 
tures. Monsieur Bardellini took six of the pictures 
at Esnes and Colonel Thurneyssen the group of 
Boche prisoners. The Farnam, the bursting bomb, 
and Guynemer pictures I obtained from George 
Trowbridge. 

I also have to thank Professor Harry Covington, 
of Princeton University, who very unselfishly de- 
voted many hours of his valuable time in smoothing 
out rough places in the original manuscript. My sin- 
cere gratitude is likewise due to several friends who 
have very kindly helped me with suggestions, proof 
reading and numerous other details. 

Julien H. Bryan. 

February 14th, 1918. 
65 Blair Hall, 

Princeton, New Jersey. 



TABLE OF CONTENTS 

PAGE 

Introduction by Dr. Lyman Abbott xiii 

Original Members of Section XII xvii 

CHAPTER 

I. Getting Ready i 

II. At Hill 304 and Mort Homme . . . . 37 

III. In the Argonne Forest 103 

IV. "En Repos," and In Champagne .... 135 
V. Coming Back 181 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 

The author working on his diary on the front seat of 

"464" Frontispiece 

The remains of two ambulances; The twenty-one am- 
bulances of 'Section XII ; One of the many towns 
which the Boches leveled to the ground in 1914. . 8 

Washing our cars; Three little residents of "Rat- 
hunt" alley ; Ten miles behind the lines 9 

Section XII making a short halt ; The old church at 
Dombasle; Our quarters or cantonment in Dom- 

BASLE 20 

Road repairers at work ; Ray Williams of Wisconsin ; 

Camouflage on the Esnes Road 21 

Morning Exercise; Four Boche "150's"; Afternoon tea 

at Poste II d'Avocourt 32 

The Chateau at Esnes ; A caisson for "75" shells ; 
The ruins of a church in Esnes; The road 
through the village 33 

"Kelly's Corner" or "Strafen's Bend" on the Esnes 

Road; The rear of the Chateau at Esnes 44 

The house across the street in Dombasle ; A typical 
communication trench in March ; The brook behind 
the church 45 

The anti-aircraft seventy-five; Ste. Menehould 

schoolboys; Our apartments in Ste. Menehould.. 56 

Children scrambling for little American flags ; Young 
Monsieur Deliege and his sister Suzanne; A sec- 
tion OF A HOSPITAL TRAIN 57 

THE GASOLINE LOCOMOTIVE AND TRAIN OF THE NARROW- 
GAUGE railway; Brancadiers putting a couch 

STRETCHER CASE IN THE AMBULANCE OF St. THOMAS ', 
"464" AND HER DRIVER 72 

Three poilus in a front line trench ; A first line 

COMMUNICATION TRENCH ABOVE St. THOMAS 73 

A QUIET PART OF "No Man's Land" NEAR St. THOMAS 84 

The "Poste de Secours" at La Harazee; A firing 

TRENCH AND HAND GRENADE POST ; TWO POILUS 
RESTING 85 

In a mine under "No Man's Land" ; In another mine 

with Amulot the "Happy" poilu in the center 98 

A mine crater after the explosion ; A supply station 
in a front line trench at La Harazee ; Midsummer 
in the Argonne forest 99 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 

The shelter of the little gun; A gas attack *his 

EVENING?) GlLMORE IN THE STEEL TURRET OF AN 
OBSERVATION POST 112 

An American made ten-ton truck; A gunboat on the 
Chalons-Prunay canal; A machine depot in Cham- 
pagne 113 

An admiring group of officers gathered around 
Guynemer; An American tractor; A German 
aeroplane bomb 130 

The mill at St. Etienne au Temple; Eighty years old 
and doing her bit in the garden; a group of 
boche prisoners 131 

Getting the village children ready for a photo- 
graph; Both eyes out and both arms torn to 
pieces by shell splinters ; A. Piatt Andrew, Di- 
rector of the Field Service, and Major Church, 
U. S. A 144 

The French "Sausage" or observation balloon; Sol- 
diers unloading cylinders of hydrogen ; The great 
motor truck and steel drum which reels in the 
7,000 feet of thin wire cable by which the balloon 
is raised and lowered 145 

Reserve soldiers, 40 to 50 years old; The two huski- 
est WORKMEN IN THE CROWD LIFTING ONE OF THE 

450-lb. shells; An artilleryman putting a time 
shell into the breech of an anti-aircraft seventy- 
five 156 

The famous hanging clock in the ruined church at 
St. Helena le Grand; The fallen bells and the 
praying angels in the church at souippes j one hun- 
dred poilu graves 157 

A German helmet; Two types of briquets — cigarette 

LIGHTERS 170 

A pill box or German machine gun post ; The entrance 
to another German machine gun post; J. T. Lloyd 
of Cornell in a "210" shell hole 171 

A pile of dead Boches south of Mt. Cornillet; Two 

German prisoners 184 

A Coudron, double motored observation plane 185 

The exterior of a seventy-five battery ; The interior 
of the seventy-five shelter ; a little french 
town in the hands of the enemy 196 

Bernard Larlengue; General G of the 

"Alpine Chasseurs" 197 

The colt machine gun on the stern; Smith, the wire- 
less OPERATOR, AND "GEORGIA" JONES ; UNLOADING 
ONE OF OUR 30-TON GUNS ; PRACTICE WITH THE THREE- 
INCH GUN ON THE LuCKENBACH 212 



INTRODUCTION 

When our President told us that the causes of the 
war were obscure and that the war did not concern 
us, he expressed the common feeling of the American 
people at the outbreak of the war. When in 191 8 
he told us that the object of the war was to make the 
world safe for Democracy and only in the triumph of 
Democracy could we expect peace, he expressed the 
common feeling of the American people at the pres- 
ent time. The difference between those two utter- 
ances indicates the distance which the American peo- 
ple had traveled during the three intervening years. 
The war has taught us something; it has taught us 
much. We now know as never before both the mean- 
ing and the value of Democracy. 

This volume affords a striking illustration of this 
change in the American point of view by portray- 
ing the change in a single mind and the causes which 
produced that change. Says the author in his pref- 
ace: 

"I went over, as did so many of the others, with 
the object of seeing war at first hand and of getting 



INTRODUCTION 

some excitement, as well as being of some service. 
But we do not care to be talked of as young heroes 
trying to save France, because that was not our idea 
in going, at any rate, not at first. But having ar- 
rived in France and learned of some of the terrible 
things which had been done by the enemy and what 
the French people had gone through, and having 
become imbued with some of the wonderful spirit 
of the French, we altered our point of view, and 
were almost ashamed of our primary object in of- 
fering our services. Moreover, we realized on get- 
ting to the front that our own little section was but 
a single unit among the five million troops consti- 
tuting the French army, and that individually we 
were not very important." 

The first of these lessons the American people 
have already learned; the second we are just be- 
ginning to learn. 

Such a book as this has two distinct values. 

It gives the reader at home a vivid picture of 
the scenes upon the field of battle. Such a book is 
all the better for not being literary. We get the 
first impressions of the actor not modified by the 
ambitions of a literary artist, and the effect of his 
artless narrative is all the greater because he has 
not in his mind the effect which he is trying to 
produce upon the reader. Simplicity, accuracy, and 



INTRODUCTION xv 

realism are his characteristics. He is so absolutely 
in the life that he has not in his mind the readers 
of the narrative. 

And for this reason the book produces upon the 
reader an effect similar to that which the events 
produced on the writer. We also alter our point 
of view as he altered his. We wonder that we 
ever thought that this war did not concern us. We 
wonder that we ever thought of leaving our kin 
across the sea to fight for the world's freedom 
without our aid. The author tells us that by his 
experience he became imbued with some of the won- 
derful spirit of the French. In reading the story of 
his experiences we become imbued through him with 
some of the same wonderful spirit. The war is no 
longer three thousand miles away; it is at our doors. 
We also have passed through a kind of baptism of 
lire. And by our companionship with our fellow cit- 
izens on their field of battle we are inspired by their 
enthusiasm and nerved by their resolve to accept no 
peace which does not give us in the destruction of 
Prussian militarism a reasonable assurance that our 
sons will never have to take part in a like campaign. 

Lyman Abbott. 

Cornwall-on-Hudson, N. Y. 



ORIGINAL MEMBERS OF SECTION XII 

NAME RESIDENCE IN AMERICA COLLEGE 

Allen, Wharton Colorado Springs, Col .... Univ. of Penna 

Benney, Philip* Pittsburg 

Bryan, Julien H Titusville, Penna Princeton ('21) 

Clark, Walter Stockbridge, Mass 

Cook, Robinson Portland, Maine Dartmouth 

Craig, Harry W Cleveland, Ohio Univ. of Wisconsin 

Crowhurst, H. W., Jr . . Philadelphia La Fayette 

Dunham, Dowse Irvington-on-the-Hudson . Harvard 

Faith, Clarence Nahant, Mass Tufts 

Gillespie, James Park . . East Orange Yale 

Gilmore, Wm Florence, Italy. "Boston Tech." 

Haven, George New York City Yale 

Houston, Henry H Philadelphia Univ. of Penna. 

Iselin, Harry Normandy, France 

Kann, Norman Pittsburg "Carnegie Tech." 

Keleher, Hugh Cambridge, Mass Harvard 

Lloyd, J. T Ithaca, N. Y Cornell 

Lundquist, S. J. H San Francisco 

Orr, Thomas Pittsburg Hamilton 

Powell, C. H Milwaukee Univ. of Wisconsin 

Walker, Croom Chicago (and Alabama) . . Univ. of Virginia 

Williams, Ray Evan . . . Dodgeville, Wis Univ. of Wisconsin 

MEN WHO JOINED THE SECTION AFTER WE LEFT PARIS 

NAME JOINED IN RESIDENCE IN AMERICA COLLEGE 

Bradley, Lloyd P Feb Berkeley, Cal Univ. of Cal. 

Chauvenet, Louis Feb St. Louis Harvard 

Coan, Raymond March . N. Y. City (& Montclair) Cornell 

* Benney entered Aviation in July and lost his life on January 25, 1918, while serving 
with the La Fayette Escadrille. 



MEN WHO JOINED THE SECTION AFTER WE LEFT PARIS 

Continued 

NAME JOINED IN RESIDENCE IN AMERICA COLLEGE 

Dixon, Philip May Milwaukee Harvard 

Harrison, W. Lyle March . . . Lebanon, Ken Oberlin 

Joyce, Thomas May Berkeley, Cal 

Lloyd, J. T March... Ithaca, N. Y Cornell 

O'Connor, Tom May Brookline, Mass 

Sinclair, Gilbert May Minneapolis Univ. Minnesota 

Stanley, Everett March . . . Milton, Mass Bowdoin 

Tenney, Luman H March. . .Ada, Minnesota Oberlin 

Ray Eaton Three fictitious persons whom I have used here and 

Ellis Frazer r there, when the mention of the real name has seemed 
Mark Payne J unwise. 



I 

GETTING READY 



"AMBULANCE 464" 



J a n uary 1 9 1 h t 1 9 1 7 . 21 Rue Rayn ouard, Paris 

Six weeks ago this morning, my alarm clock got 
me out of bed at five o'clock, in my little two by four 
room in the Erie Y. M. C. A. and off I rushed to my 
daily work, driving stakes and chaining track with 
the Engineering gang of the New York Central. It 
had all been very interesting for a few weeks after 
I left high-school last June. But after six long 
months it was becoming monotonous and I was ach- 
ing to get away, to try my hand at something else. 
Since I was staying out of school for a whole year, 
waiting until I was eighteen before I entered col- 
lege, it didn't take much to urge me on when I read 
a poster saying, "Volunteers Wanted for the Amer- 
ican Ambulance Field Service in France." My father 
was enthusiastic about it. So immediately after the 
holidays, I left my home in Titusville, Pennsylvania, 
and sailed on the French liner "Espagne" on the 
eighth of January, along with twenty other fellows 
in the same service. We had a wonderful trip, no 
submarines and very little unpleasant weather. Six 
of the men, including my cabinmate, joined the Paris 



2 "AMBULANCE 464" 

Service which works for the big American Ambu- 
lance Hospital in Neuilly. The rest of us went to 
the headquarters of the Field Service on Rue Ray- 
nouard, where we are now, waiting to be sent to the 
front. Soon several of the fellows will leave, to fill 
vacancies in one of the old sections. But there is a 
rumor going around that a new section, Number 
Twelve, is being organized and that our bunch is to 
be part of it. No wonder that we are all hoping that 
this is true, for it will be far better to go out with 
fellows whom we know than to break into the cliques 
of an old crowd. 

We are living just across the river from the Eiffel 
Tower, in a wonderful old house in Passy. Its 
grounds, which cover an entire block, have come 
down from the old Hottinguer and Bartholdi fam- 
ilies. Ben Franklin, they tell us, used to stay here 
when he was in Paris and some of his first kite ex- 
periments were made in the park behind the house. 
All our quarters are downstairs and the upper part 
of the building has been turned into offices for the 
business end of the service. Dr. A. Piatt Andrew, 
•Steven Galatti and Dr. Gros have separate offices 
here. Then there is the mailing department and 
Mr. Fisher's room, where we go to see about getting 
our necessary papers. The first thing we did on ar- 
riving yesterday was to report at the latter place to 
receive directions concerning the "Permis de Sejour," 



"AMBULANCE 464" 3 

which we must get from the Prefecture of Police 
if we wish to remain in France. 

Living in Paris just at present reminds one of the 
joys of an Arctic expedition. It's terribly cold, and 
raw and damp besides, and there is such a scarcity 
of coal that even after the government has carefully 
divided it among the inhabitants, there is just enough 
for a few hours' comfort and then a room at 45 or 
50 degrees F. all the rest of the day. It is so bad 
in the quarters here that the ink has actually frozen 
in my suitcase. Every night there is a mad rush to 
undress as soon as we hit the bedroom and we make 
pretty good speed in dressing in the morning, too. 
Whenever we feel we can't stand it any longer, we 
pay out fifteen centimes, about three cents in our 
money, for a ride in the subway which they call the 
Metro; they tell us it is the only warm place in 
Paris, in this, their coldest winter in twenty-seven 
years. The poor, of course, suffer the most. They 
can't afford to buy much coal when it sells for sev- 
enty dollars a ton. And so, daily, it is given out by 
a special card system at booths all over the city. 
Every morning crowds of poor women collect hours 
before the time of distribution, patiently wait their 
tufn, and then go away one by one lugging a fifty- 
pound sack of the precious stuff. 



January 25th. 21 Rue Raynouard, Paris. 

Section Twelve is no longer a dream. All the 
necessary men are here and the twenty-two Fords 
have just had the last touches put on their ambu- 
lance bodies at Kellner's. We have no section leader 
or chef, as yet, nor have we been given our respective 
cars; but they tell us we will probably get our orders 
from the French Automobile Service to leave for 
the front next week. It won't be long before we get 
the cars. 

From the stories of fellows who are in on permis- 
sion from different parts of the front it appears that 
a Sanitary Section consists of twenty to twenty-five 
ambulances, each of which carries three stretcher or 
five sitting cases. There are also two big White 
trucks for supplies, extra parts, and the luggage of 
the eight Frenchmen who go along as mechanics, 
cooks and assistants in clerical work. Then they 
usually have two staff cars, one of which belongs to 
the "Chef Americain" and the other to the French 
Lieutenant in charge of the Section. They live in a 
small town, often a destroyed one, between the front 
line trenches and the first hospitals in the rear; and 
for ordinary work they send about five men out each 

4 



"AMBULANCE 464" 5 

day for twenty-four hour duty at their different 
posts. These are little first aid stations, usually 
eight hundred or a thousand yards behind the first 
line trenches. In hilly country, however, one can 
often go in a car to within four or five hundred 
yards of No Man's Land; but in level stretches like 
Champagne one seldom gets closer than two miles. 
The wounded are carried by stretcher bearers from 
wherever they have fallen to a tiny Poste de Secours, 
in the second or third line trenches. Here they are 
given quick treatment in the one-room underground 
hospital, and are rushed on afterwards through the 
communication trenches to one of our posts. 
These are underground, too, and are little bet- 
ter than the posts in the trenches. But they 
can handle more men here and do emergency 
work, like amputating, if necessary. Besides, when a 
big attack is on, blesses are brought in much faster 
than we can remove them and they take care of them 
here for a few hours, and sometimes for days if nec- 
essary. Our work is to load up the ambulances with 
the assistance of the brancardters (stretcher-bear- 
ers) and carry them back to an evacuation hospital 
ten or twelve miles behind the lines. These are 
rather crude affairs and seldom employ any women 
nurses. When they become crowded or get cases 
too difficult to handle, they send the wounded to big- 
ger hospitals further back, usually in a nearby city. 



6 ''AMBULANCE 4 6 4 n 

Such places are twenty-five or thirty miles behind 
the front and are very similar to our base hospitals. 
From here patients are sent by train into Paris for 
major operations or to the south of France to re- 
cuperate. 

Mr. Fisher took five of us out in the Ford truck 
Tuesday morning and gave us a short driving-lesson 
in anticipation of the final test for the French driver's 
license which we must have before we go to the 
front. It was comparatively simple for most of 
us; but some real excitement started when Payne, 
one of the Espagne men, started driving. He is sort 
of a queer duck, anyway. The first night he was in 
Paris he crawled over the picket fence around the 
Eiffel Tower and was almost shot by a sentry. He 
did nobly on Tuesday, however. He had barely 
taken the wheel before we saw that he had never 
driven much before. He jammed on the accelerator 
just as we were rounding a corner, headed for a 
tree, and unfortunately missed it by a few inches, 
or we would have stopped here. Then he speeded 
up considerably, and skidded for thirty feet along a 
trolley-track embankment, scraped the side of an old 
dray horse and then ducked under its nose just for 
spite. We finally ended up two miles further on, 
with Mr. Fisher hanging firmly to the wheel and 
doing his best to get Payne's feet off the pedals so 
that he could use his own and stop the machine. . . . 



"AMBULANCE 464" 7 

Payne now thinks he ought to have another practice 
lesson before he goes to the front. We agree with 
him. 

We were given the second dose of typhoid and 
para-typhoid bugs today. Dr. Gros stuck something 
like a billion and a half in each fellow's arm and 
we certainly knew afterwards that they were having 
a grand time all by themselves in there. Everybody 
feels rotten and some of the men have gone to bed 
already, although it is only seven thirty. It is 
para-T, not typhoid itself which makes one's arm so 
sore a few hours after the injection. 

When we first got here, we could do pretty much 
as we pleased, as long as we saw about our papers 
and had our uniforms made. But now that the Sec- 
tion is going to leave soon, and since they are short- 
handed at Kellner's anyway, the whole bunch goes 
out there every afternoon and unpacks and mounts 
Ford chassis. Women and children flock around in 
swarms whenever we are working on the crates. 
They watch us like hawks, eager to seize the tiniest 
splinter which may fall from a broken board. They 
figure that one good-sized basket of chips will cook 
a supper which otherwise they would have had to 
eat cold. We used to sight-see a little mornings ; but 
every big thing like the Louvre and the Eiffel Tower 
is closed for the duration of the war and it isn't 
very interesting wandering around the outside of 



8 "AMBULANCE 464" 

buildings. Entertainment in the evening is not diffi- 
cult, for many of the big theatres and both the Opera 
and Opera Comique are still running. Anderson, 
my roommate on the Espagne, who is now at Neuilly, 
and I have gone three times already to the Opera, 
where we saw Manon and L'Etranger. The music 
was wonderful but I think we enjoyed the comfort- 
able warmth of the building almost as much. Every- 
one goes, from the poor poilu, in on a few days' fur- 
lough, who listens enraptured from his two-franc 
seat in the fourth balcony, to the bemedalled Rus- 
sian and Italian officers, who, as guests of the French 
Republic, occupy the seats in the Orchestra Circle 
far below. There are usually many women in the 
audience, but most of them are widows; at least you 
seldom see one who isn't in mourning for a brother, 
a son or a husband. . . . Broadway is still lit up 
after the theatres are out, but here everything is 
dark. It is against the law to use electricity for il- 
luminating signs or store-window^s. I have noticed 
that some of the fashionable shops are using long 
tapering candles which probably burn out by them- 
selves in the early hours of the morning. 




i. The remains of two ambulances, destroyed by German shell-fire. They were 
brought into Paris to encourage the new arrivals. 

2. The twenty-one ambulances of Section XII, assembled in the yard at 21 Rue 
Raynouard. 

3. One of the many towns which the Boches leveled to the ground in 1914- 




i. Winter sport — washing our cars in the river Couzances at Jubecourt. 

2. Three little residents of "Rat-hunt" alley, in Jubecourt. All of them have hob- 
nails in their shoes. 

3. Ten miles behind the lines, in our dining room, the cowstable in Jubecourt. 
Every evening a few poilus dropped to sing and tell stories with us. 



January 315?. 

Today we started all the new Ambulances and 
drove them down into the park below the house. 
Here they were carefully lined up and examined to 
see that no part of the equipment was missing. Then 
after dinner Mr. Fisher assigned each one of us 
to a car and gave us its number. Mine turned out 
to be four hundred and sixty-four, and the name plate 
on its side read "Schenectady Ambulance." It was 
very kind of the people in Schenectady to donate 
the machine, but it is certainly a terrible pet name for 
an automobile to have. There are a lot of Ameri- 
cans who don't know how to pronounce the word 
Schenectady, to say nothing of the queer noises the 
Frenchmen make trying to say it. Already it has 
been called everything from Shenickadaydy to Skin- 
neckodidy. The motor seems to be O. K. I took it 
around the block for a trial run after dinner and 
had no trouble with the engine. A taxi collided with 
me up on Rue Raynouard, however, when I was 
completing the test, and smashed in my side-box 
pretty badly. The big machine turned from a nar- 
row alley into the main street without sounding its 
horn and I couldn't stop in time after I saw it. The 

9 



io "AMBULANCE 464" 

damage done was very slight, and it will only need 
a new box which can be easily replaced. 

I wore my uniform for the first time this morning. 
It gives you the most wonderful feeling to be able 
to ride in the Metro and walk around down town 
without having every soul in Paris stare at you as if 
you were some terrible slacker. 



February $th f 19 17. Still at 21 Rue Raynouard. 

They gave us our chef the day before yesterday. 
He is Harry Iselin of Section Two; and tonight, 
they had the farewell banquet in honor of Section 
XII. Dr. Gros and Dr. Andrew both made inter- 
esting speeches afterwards. Mr. Simonds, War Cor- 
respondent of the New York Tribune, spoke for a 
few minutes, and after him came the finest talk of 
the evening, perhaps the most touching words I 
have ever heard. It was given by Monsieur Hughes 
Le Roux, a famous French journalist and adven- 
turer. He told us in almost perfect English how he 
had lost both of his sons early in the war and he 
bravely described how one had died and how he had 
barely managed to get to his bedside and hear the 
story from his own lips before he passed away. He 
showed us. why the work of the American Ambu- 
lance meant so much to him and he made every man 
who had come from a mere desire for adventure, 
feel that it was really his duty to help France. A 
few toasts to the two nations followed this, and with 
them came the end of a pleasant evening. 

Every time I start a letter home something un- 
expected happens and I put it off another day. Yes- 

11 



12 "AMBULANCE 464" 

terday when I was reading the Paris Edition of the 
New York Herald, I got so interested in the ac- 
count of our probable break with Germany that I 
bought a Daily Mail and a Matin besides, and spent 
all the time when I should have been writing, bicker- 
ing with the fellows over the news. Then on Friday 
the new men from the liner Chicago arrived and 
when I was introduced to one of my cousins from 
Pittsburg whom I hadn't known was coming over, I 
didn't bother with letter-writing any more that day. 
Unfortunately he was seized with pneumonia yester- 
day on his way back from Bordeaux in a convoy of 
Fords. He is now in a serious condition at the 
American Hospital in Neuilly. His chances are said 
to be about even. Bliss, another Ambulance man, 
died last week from the same disease. 

The "Ordre de Mouvement" for the Section has 
just come. Unless the Eiffel Tower falls on our cars 
during the night, we shall leave here at noon to- 
morrow. 



Thursday, Feb. $th, 19 17. Montmirail 

Section XII left its comfortable (?) quarters in 
Rue Raynouard today, after a grand review and 
military send off by Capitaine Aujay, the Frenchman 
who directs all the Automobile work in Paris. He 
delivered a thrilling speech in French which none of 
us understood until it was carefully interpreted 
afterwards. 

It took us several hours to get out of Paris, for 
we had to go eastward across the whole city. Sev- 
eral of the cars had engine trouble and one received 
a bad bump from a street car. Otherwise nothing 
unusual happened. By the time we came to Cham- 
pigny, a little village twenty kilometers from the 
city, it was noon, and we stopped there for lunch. 
It was a funny meal, served in a queer little cafe. 
First a loaf or so of stale bread and some wine ap- 
peared and after a long wait some prime ribs of 
horse. This appeared to be the last course, but as 
we were about to leave, in came a plate of rice and 
a minute later some cheese and jam. 

In the afternoon we started up at a faster pace 
than before, with orders to keep the cars about fifty 
yards apart. It was extremely cold, and the bitter 

13 



14 "AMBULANCE 464" 

wind, which was blowing directly against us, seemed 
to go right through our heavy mackinaws. Now and 
then someone would stop, to change a spark plug or 
a tire, or perhaps to put in a little oil. Often, when 
he tried to pass another machine in order to get 
back to his old position in the convoy, a heated scrap 
would arise. Sometimes they raced for two or three 
miles, trying to push each other off the road. And 
before the afternoon was over, the cars were 
strung out in a line four miles long, with each driver 
jealously guarding his position while he kept it, and 
madly attempting to get it back again if it were taken 
away. 

It was quite dark when we entered Montmirail, 
but we could not help seeing the ghastly ruins of the 
place, which the Germans had leveled in their ad- 
vance before the Battle of the Marne. The staff 
car, which had gone on ahead, found an old dance 
hall where we could spend the night, and a place 
nearby in which to park our cars. We drained our 
radiators hurriedly, and had supper at a little cafe. 
Then as soon as we got back to quarters most of us 
took our blankets from our cars, and turned in with- 
out undressing. 



Saturday, Feb. 10th. Longeville. 

I learned a hard lesson last night about sleeping. 
Never make your bed on a slope. I had fixed mine 
on the straw, with one end considerably lower than 
the other, and when I awoke this morning I was ac- 
tually five feet lower down the hill than when I 
went to sleep. I had, moreover, slipped out into 
the cold air half a dozen times during the night. 

It was mighty hard work starting the cars this 
morning, on account of the stiffness of the motors 
and the extreme cold. There were a number which 
we could not start at all by cranking, and we were 
obliged to tow them up and down the road in high 
speed, until they were warmed up. This took some 
time and it was almost eleven o'clock before we left 
the village. 

Late in the afternoon we stopped outside of Bar- 
le-Duc and were delayed there thirty minutes be- 
cause of a long convoy of supply wagons which had 
just entered the city. We thought we heard some 
big guns in the distance while we waited and a num- 
ber of aeroplanes flew overhead. Two or three 
were low enough to enable us to see the red, white 
and blue targets on each wing. All of the Allied 

15 



1 6 "AMBULANCE 464" 

planes use this as an identification mark. Now we 
entered the town, and everyone, feeling tired and 
hungry, thought that our drive was over. There was 
no room for us in Bar-le-Duc, however, and We had 
to push on to a little place called Longeville; and al- 
though it was only five kilometers off, it was as tire- 
some a ride as I have ever taken. 

We left the machines at length in a muddy side- 
street for the night, and then wandered off to get 
our supper and straw for bedding. 



Monday, Feb. 14th. Longeville. 

We slept in an old barn to which we had been de- ' , 
tailed the first two nights, but the close atmosphere 
drove us to our cars. I have made a regular little 
cabin out of mine. A good-sized bundle of straw, 
spread over the floor of the car, makes a fine mat- 
tress and for my heating and lighting system I have 
two kerosene lanterns. I am writing now sitting up 
in bed, and with my mackinaw on, since the heaters 
are not always too efficient. Pretty soon it will be- 
come stuffy and then I will throw back the canvas 
flap and the side windows and go to sleep. 

On Monday we shifted all the cars to a new park- 
ing place behind the village church. Iselin had us 
move them here so that we might have a better lo- 
cation in case we were not ordered to move imme- 
diately. 

Yesterday I saw a wedding in this church. It was 
a sad affair. The bride was a great, strong peasant 
woman and the groom a sickly, little chap who could 
not get into the army. The whole bridal party, 
father, mother and all the relatives were dressed in 
deep mourning and the only happy persons in the 
entire church were the altar boys who played tug of 

17 



1 8 ''AMBULANCE 464" 

war with the Priest's robe and fought over the stick 
in the incense pot. 

The food is much better now. We have taken 
possession of the Cafe near the canal and have 
rigged up a temporary kitchen in the woodshed. 
Harry ran across the Quaker Oats box recently and 
every morning we have oatmeal which is a lot better 
than prune jam on stale army bread. This bread is 
certainly remarkable stuff. It comes in freight cars 
from the interior and is usually two weeks old be- 
fore we get it. It is often brittle, like a piece of 
wood, and is about as palatable as soft pine. How- 
ever, it is supposed to be nourishing and I think that 
it is really more wholesome than our own American 
white bread. 



Tuesday, Feb. 20th. Longeville, awaiting orders. 

We have been attached to a division, the 132nd, 
so the Lieutenant told us tonight. It is only a few 
miles away, near Brillon, and tomorrow or the next 
day a few cars will be called out to do evacuation 
work. I presume it will be to carry a few sick or 
accident cases and perhaps to get acquainted with 
the different regiments of the division. Everyone 
is working hard on his car so that it may be in tip- 
top shape if he is detailed to go. It will be a great 
relief to have something to do. So far we have just 
hung around the Cafe, waiting for the next meal to 
come. We play poker, read, or practice French 
on the cook; and once or twice a day the man- 
dolin and the guitar get going and we have some 
singing. And if you grow tired of sitting indoors 
all day, you can take long walks among the hills 
overlooking Bar-le-Duc and the Ornain. But even 
this* has become tiresome and we joyfully welcome 
the idea of getting to work. 

I was very dirty when I finished going over my 
car and since I had not washed for five or six days, 
I filled my basin full of nice hot radiator water and 
took an outdoor bath. The weather was quite chilly 

19 



20 "AMBULANCE 464" 

and before I had finished a group of wondering chil- 
dren had gathered around. They were amazed that 
anyone should wash in the open or even bother with 
keeping clean at all in such weather. I shall never 
forget how they looked in their black aprons with 
their clumsy school packs hanging over their shoul- 
ders, as they stood beside my car. I pestered them 
with simple little questions, just to help my French; 
and oh, how they laughed when they found I- didn't 
know an easy word like "cat" or "barn." 

Almost every day now we hear the big guns along 
the Saint Mihiel sector; and tonight some very 
heavy shelling is going on. The nearest guns are 
about twenty miles away. 

I tried developing a few films last evening in the 
loft in the barn. It was certainly working under dif- 
ficulties. The temperature of the room was a couple 
of degrees below freezing and although I had some 
luke-warm water when I started, it went down to 
forty five degrees while the films were developing. 
Of course, I spoiled a number of mighty good pic- 
tures which I had taken on the ride out from Paris. 
I managed to save just two or three mediocre nega- 
tives out of the whole lot. 

We got our gas masks and helmets today. I came 
a little late and had to be content with a big affair 
which comes way down over my ears. 




1. Section XII making a short halt, while in convoy from Dombasle to Waly. 

2. The old church at Dombasle. The images escaped unharmed in the bombardment. 

3. Our quarters or cantonment in Dombasle. We have the best house in the village. 




i. Road repairers at work, cleaning up the ruins of Dombasle. They tear down 
the walls and use the debris to fill up the ruts. 

2. Ray Williams of Wisconsin, next to a "Put out your lights" sign, about eight 
miles from the front lines. 

3. Camouflage on the Esnes road, screening us from Mort Homme. 



February 26th, 19 17. Within 464, Longeville. 

"Ott" Kann and Gilmore have just left the car. 
We have been enjoying a delightful afternoon tea 
together, consisting of sardines, petit beurre and Ra- 
diator Water Cocoa. The latter we made by run- 
ning the motor fast for a few minutes until the 
water began to boil and then pouring it into a cup 
of prepared powdered chocolate. Aside from the 
mineral water flavor, it was very good. 

On Thursday we had our first evacuation work. 
I rode along with Cook to learn the roads to the 
different villages in which the division is stationed. 
We drove to Brillon which is about eight kilos from 
Bar-le-Duc and finding no cases there we went on 
to Haironville where we picked up two assis (sitting 
cases) and a couche (a stretcher case). The latter 
was in bad shape and we had to drive back very 
carefully. We dropped all three cases at the big 
hospital in Bar, and then speeded home by the canal 
road. 

I drove Number 148, the Supply Car, today to 
get the section ravitaillement from the military 
storehouse near the Railroad station. We were 
obliged to wait an hour and a half to get our rations 



22 "AMBULANCE 464" 

of bread, pinard, cheese and meat and a small box 
of coal for the kitchen. The engine got cold in the 
meanwhile and I had quite a time starting it. The 
old bus is in bad shape anyway, for the brake band 
is about worn off and I can't go into reverse at all. 
After dinner I wrote a long letter home. Phil- 
lipe, the French sergeant saw it and made me mail 
it in two separate envelopes. There is some military 
rule that no letter shall weigh over twenty grams, 
the equivalent of about four average sheets. 



Tuesday, Feb. 27th. The Same. 

My first real trip alone was successful. I took 
the flivver to Bar this afternoon and from there 
over the hills to Lisle-en-Rigault. They wanted me 
to take seven assis here and though five is usually 
our limit, I crowded six inside and had one sit up 
in front with me. Counting myself, this made eight 
people which is a pretty heavy load for any Ford, 
especially for one of our ambulances with its long 
overhanging body. However, it pulled very well 
over the bumpy little road leading to the main, Bar- 
le-Duc to St. Dizier, highway. As usual, since they 
were all malade cases, I left them at the H. O. E. in 
Bar. Then I had to return to Lisle and go on from 
there to Saudrupt where there was an officer with 
a severe case of mumps. While he was getting 
ready to leave, I got into conversation with some 
poilus standing near. Several of them had studied 
English in school and most of them knew a little 
German. We got along remarkably well and I was 
greatly surprised to learn that they did not object 
to speaking allemand, as they call German. One 
young chap became quite interested when he learned 
that I was an American (everyone around here be- 

23 



24 "AMBULANCE 464" 

lieves that we are English, on account of our uni- 
forms) and after giving me his name and address, 
made me promise to write to him. Tony Cucuron 
was his name. He was rather surprised when I told 
him that we were volunteers; but when I said that 
we not only received no pay except the poilus' five 
cents a day, but had paid our own passage over and 
had bought all our equipment ourselves, he wouldn't 
believe me. He could not understand why we should 
leave our pleasant homes in America to come into 
a war like this, even though it were to help France. 

Crowhurst, the mechanic, ground down 148's 
valves today and also scraped out the carbon. Af- 
terwards he did the same thing to Powell's car. 
Most of the others, however, he won't have to touch 
for some time yet. 

This afternoon Williams and I walked into town. 
We wandered around for some time, until a Patis- 
serie with some pretty cream tarts in the window, 
caught our eye. We spent all we could afford here. 
Just after we left we ran across a couple of Section 
IV men. They are having some heavy work up in 
the Argonne, about fifty kilometers north of here 
and not far from Clermont. 

Iselin was not feeling well when he went the 
rounds with the Medecin Chef today and when he 
came in tonight they found he had Scarlet Fever. 
Benney took him into the hospital in Bar where he 



"AMBULANCE 464" 25 

will be well taken care of. Everyone is quite worried 
about it, however, for not only may the stuff spread 
through the section, but we will be without a chef 
for five or six weeks; and this is rather a serious 
loss, because we are very likely to move up to the 
front in a few days and one of us will have to take 
charge. 



February 2$th. Hotel "Barn" at 

Vadelaincourt. 

Farewells were said to Longeville and the old 
Cafe this morning. We headed directly north on the 
Verdun Road and pretty soon we began to see things 
we had read about at home. Here were the remains 
of a village, shot to pieces in 19 14. The streets 
were quiet. Not a soul was left in the place. Again 
we would pass a group of young German prisoners 
with P. G. (prisonnier de guerre) written in huge 
letters on their backs; or perhaps some imported 
"Indo-China" laborers at work repairing the road. 
Once in a while a big gun would boom northeast of 
us. Now and then we would see a group of aero- 
plane hangars with their audiphones and anti-aircraft 
"seventy-fives." But the most interesting thing of 
all was when we stopped at a cross-road to watch 
one of our regiments go by. They were marching 
slowly when they drew near, for their packs were 
heavy and they had been walking steadily since sun- 
rise. But the fine young manhood which fills the 
ranks of our own army was no longer there. Here 
was a lad of seventeen, barely able to walk twenty 
miles a day, let alone to carry his sixty pounds of 

26 



"AMBULANCE 464" 27 

equipment that distance; and beside him strode a 
tall gaunt man of forty whom the long march had 
fatigued even more than it had the youth. As they 
passed us, their band broke out with a lively air and 
every soldier there straightened up immediately, 
and unconsciously quickened his step. And I shall 
never forget how they cheered and sang when the 
band played the "Marseillaise." Company after 
company took up the strain, and before long it had 
spread far down the valley, to the other end of the 
regiment. 

We entered Vadelaincourt about noon and parked 
our cars at the entrance of the big aviation field 
there. Two minutes after we arrived every fellow 
in the section was out exploring the grounds. There 
were no officers around and since the workmen 
seemed to have no objections to our examining the 
machines, we went into every hangar and looked 
them all over. There were only three types here, 
the Farnam observation plane, and two fast little 
machines, the Spad and Nieuport. All of these were 
biplanes but some distance down the hill were six 
or seven monoplane tents. Lundquist and Gilmore 
got a couple of empty bombs as souvenirs. They 
are a yard long, look like great steel cigars, and are 
rather awkward to carry around. 

The guns sound extremely clear now. We are 
about fifteen kilometers from Verdun and ten from 



28 "AMBULANCE 464" 

the Meuse. From the rumors floating around it 
seems that a big drive is coming. We will probably 
move on in a day or so to a point closer to the lines. 

The fellows are demanding that I "douse the 
glim" in the hayloft where we are sleeping. I'll 
have to stop here. 

N. B. Morning of March 1st. They called me 
out on guard duty at four o'clock and for two hours 
I tramped around the cars, in the dark. When the 
day broke shortly before six I started memorizing 
the car numbers and their owners. I had them all 
by heart in less than an hour. As for the guarding 
itself, all I did was to scare away a few rats. 

Four letters came from home today. They were 
dated February 10th, and took exactly eighteen days 
in transit. 



Monday, March $th. "Salle-a-manager" 

Jubecourt. 

We had been only two days in Vadelaincourt 
when orders came to move on to Jubecourt, a village 
about four miles away. So off we went. Now we 
have all the cars lined up on the main square, and, as 
at Longeville, we are obliged to sleep in them because 
of the rats in the stable where the Frenchmen stay. 

It is still very cold. Last night after most of us 
were in bed, Frazer put on his pajamas just 
to see how they felt again. But he got so cold 
in doing so that he crawled out onto the roof of his 
ambulance, intending to exercise a bit up there. The 
space was too limited, however, for any violent ex- 
ertions; and so when he looked over to the next 
car, just six feet away and saw beyond it all the other 
machines extending in a long row almost to the road, 
he decided to do a little steeple-chasing. He began 
by landing on Cookie's car with a terrific thump, and 
continued on his rather uncertain journey all the way 
down the twelve ambulances. It may have been 
great fun for him but it completely ruined the peace 
of mind of the occupants of the other cars, for most 
of them were sound asleep and didn't seem to enjoy 

29 



30 "AMBULANCE 464" 

at all the little earthquake which shook all their be- 
longings down from the rack on top of them. Ten 
minutes later when the pajama clad athlete emerged 
from his cabin again and tried his dash over the 
roofs of the cars for the second time, his former 
victims were ready for him and he was obliged to 
make a hasty retreat through a "tir de barrage" of 
soft mud and snow. 

Although we can't sleep in the old stable we have 
fixed up a dining-room and kitchen there. In the 
former we have two stoves and some tables and 
benches which we made from the planking of the 
second floor. And since there are really no more 
malades to carry here than before, we spend most 
of our time in this room. 

Two German planes crossed the lines today in 
the direction of Bar. But they soon changed their 
direction when the French anti-aircraft guns began 
to pepper them. They were up almost twelve thou- 
sand feet, slightly out of range, I think. It was 
most interesting to watch the shrapnel break into 
great puffs of white smoke, sometimes rather near 
them but more often a long way off. I guess 
the guns do little more than keep them high up; and 
one of the Frenchmen said that the seventy-five near- 
est us had brought down only one German machine 
during the whole war. 

Besides our dining room tables we have put 



"AMBULANCE 464" 31 

up two stoves in the center of the room. The larger 
of these makes ideal toast out of army bread which 
we find loses much of its oak-like firmness and 
becomes fairly palatable when cooked this way. 
But, as so frequently happens in America, a 
company has been formed which has a complete 
monopoly on the toast producing parts of the stove. 
The Jubecourt "Toast Trust" as the organization 
is called, is composed of six members. Every day 
before each meal one of them saunters in and takes 
possession of the army bread refinery. He starts 
work immediately and makes about twice as much 
toast as they need. It is rather slow work and the 
independent companies seldom get a show before 
the meal is half done. Occasionally when a di- 
rector of the trust gets careless and leaves a vacant 
place, one of the outsiders sneaks on a fresh piece 
of bread. Then when he goes away, he takes two 
or three pieces and the trust wants to sue him for 
trespassing and burglary. 

"I'll have to stop writing now. My lamp has been 
flickering for some time, and now it has gone out 
entirely. 



March 8th, 19 17. Still in Jubecourt. 

To the tune of a mouth organ attempting every- 
thing from "Melody in F" to "O, du lieber Augus- 
tine," and the noise issuing from a stud poker game 
going on at the other end of the room, I sat down 
to write this evening. It is pretty bad here, but 
worse in my own car. Five new men came yester- 
day to take the places of some of our fellows who 
are sick. Powell and Haven have pneumonia and 
Harry Iselin is still ill with scarlet fever. And since 
there are always a couple of chaps laid up with 
grippe or tonsilitis, we can make good use of them. 
Today we had for breakfast what Andre, the 
cook, calls "Quawcour Ats" — (oatmeal). This was 
followed by the usual stale bread and jam. About 
once a week we get a little butter, and last Sunday 
morning we were given one fried egg apiece upon 
a square inch of ham. I believe I enjoyed it more 
than any meal I have ever eaten. For dinner we 
had some rather tough Irish stew, which Andre 
says he used to make for Baron Rothschild, with 
pinard and cheese for dessert. Supper was a three 
course meal with army bread soup, boiled lentils 
9 32 




i. Morning exercise in front of the "Poste de Secours" in Montzeville. The dugout 
is on the right. 

2. Four Boche "150V (6 inch shells) exploding behind some carefully concealed 
batteries near Montzeville, after passing directly over our heads. 

3. Afternoon tea at Post Two in the Bois (forest) d'Avocourt. We sleep in the 
shelter behind the four poilus. My car is in the background. 




1. The chateau at Esnes. Behind it lies Hill 304. Our post was in the wine-cellars 
underneath. In the foreground are six wooden crosses. 

2. A caisson for " 75 " shells, which a Boche shell finished near the church. 

3. The ruins of the church in Esnes. 

4. The road through the village. The water is a foot deep in places here and con- 
ceals all the fresh shell holes. 



"AMBULANCE 464" 33 

(a concoction which tastes likes oats), and chocolate 
mush as the big items. 

I have just returned from the regular nightly rat 
hunt. It is a pastime not very well known in Amer- 
ica but very popular here at the front. Every eve- 
ning we collect our clubs and flashlights and raid an 
old barn near the river. Two or three of us usually 
rush in together, flash our lights about until we spot 
a rat and then fall upon it with our sticks. It takes 
a good clean shot to kill one and we consider our- 
selves lucky if we get two or three in an evening. 



March n. Inside "Shenickadaydy" Jubecourt. 

You can talk all you want about the good old 
spreads at boarding school and college, but when you 
put five husky young fellows, two gasoline blow- 
torches, three bottles of champagne and every edible 
from canned chicken to welsh rarebit into one little 
Ford ambulance you come pretty close to approach- 
ing the infinity of fun. This was the kind of cele- 
bration we had tonight in Gilmore's car; and it 
lasted until the early hours of the morning. There 
were Lundquist and Dunham, Chauvenet and Gil- 
more, and I, packed into the rear end of 443. It 
was the queerest party I have ever attended. In 
the first place our legs were all tied together in a 
knot in the center. Gilmore himself, owner of the 
banquet hall and master of ceremonies sat at one 
end and made army bread toast for the Welsh rare- 
bit. He cooked it on a piece of brass shell casing, 
hammered out flat, with the blow-torch underneath 
it to supply the heat. Lundquist mixed the egg sauce 
for the lobster salad, while Dunham opened the 
cans of Sardines, peas, and chicken. Chauvenet had 
to test the champagne after he had uncorked one 
bottle and my job was to butter the hardtack which 

34 



"AMBULANCE 464" 35 

we had stolen from the kitchen, and also to see that 
the smaller torch which was boiling the water for 
the chocolate didn't tip over into Lundquist's lap. 
We ate course after course of stuff which Gil had 
gotten at some time or other from the Epicerie. 
But cocoa, lobster, champagne, welsh rarebit, peas 
and hardtack don't work too well together, the 
bunch became more and more uproarious, and the 
party almost ended in a rough and tumble contest 
with the lighted lamps as weapons. 

General N 1, the commander of our Division, 

passed through the village this afternoon and re- 
viewed the Section. Our orders were to stand mo- 
tionless beside our cars and to look straight ahead. 
But the general was a good natured old fellow and 
spoke to several of the men as he passed, instead of 
marching formally by, funeral fashion. If they do 
any attacking, he will lead the 132nd when they go 
up to the front. 



II 

AT HILL 304 AND MORT HOMME 



II 

March \\th } 19 17. Our last day at Jubecourt. 

At last the good news has come. Tomorrow 
morning we are to end this lazy existence and take 
Section One's place at Dombasle. This afternoon, 
the Medecin Chef piled ten of us into two ambu- 
lances and took us over some roads north of Dom- 
basle which we will use in our work there. A few 
miles from Jubecourt we found ourselves in a thick 
wood which my map called "Bois d'Avocourt." Soon 
we veered off sharply to the left, onto a bumpy road 
where there was barely room for two cars to pass. 
All the camions and munition wagons are forced to 
use it because the Boches have the exact range of 
the main route and pepper it continually. Suddenly, 
as we were passing a couple of bomb-proofs or 
abris, a terrific explosion sounded behind us and 
for a minute we thought it was a Boche shell arriv- 
ing; but three more bangs followed shortly and we 
soon learned that it was a battery of I55's at work. 
Here we were, literally on top of a battery of 6 inch 
guns which the Germans battered daily, as We could 
tell by the splintered trees and numerous shell holes. 

39 



4 o "AMBULANCE 464" 

Yet they were so cleverly concealed that even when 
they were fired, all that we could see was the flame 
from the mouth of the gun. We went on to three 
or four "Postes de Secours" to which we will come 
soon for twenty-four hour stretches, waiting for 
wounded and carrying them when they arrive to 
some hospital ten or twelve miles in the rear. At 
one place about a mile from the front line trenches, 
where we stopped for a few minutes, Crowhurst and 
Faith stumbled into a pile of heavy iron balls with 
queer caps attached. They carried three or four 
along for several miles, only to learn later from 
one of the Frenchmen that they were hand grenades, 
and would explode in eight seconds after the cap was 
touched. Here and there we encountered a fresh 
shell hole in the road and even oftener the traces 
of an old one which had been filled with crushed 
stone. Luckily no shells fell near us today but the 
fellows in another car who took a different road said 
they had some narrow escapes. I found out later 
that they always tell you this. 

We held an informal reception in the barn tonight 
after the rat hunt. Some of the Frenchmen in the 
village dropped in and told several mighty inter- 
esting stories about their experiences in the war. I 
couldn't understand a great deal but I remember 
they talked a lot about the inside story of the sec- 
ond battle of Verdun, and the sacrifices the French 



"AMBULANCE 464" 41 

made to keep Douaumont and Vaux. Then they 
switched to the very beginning of the war, -when 
the Germans first violated the Red Cross laws by 
concealing machine guns in their Ambulances and 
driving them up to No Man's Land, seemingly to 
collect wounded after an attack. After this ambu- 
lances were not allowed to go up to the first lines. 
I only wish that I knew more French for there were 
lots of interesting points that I missed entirely. 

When the party finally broke up, Benney and I 
went outside to watch the star shells bursting nine 
miles away, around Avocourt and Hill 304. It is 
quite a sight to watch them shoot up into the heav- 
ens, break forth in a brilliant magnesium light and 
then slowly descend in a parachute until the flame 
dies down. I don't suppose we will be so fond of 
them though, when we get in among them. 

Some Titusville Heralds came today and I en- 
joyed the Rural news especially. If I recall cor- 
rectly, Samantha Babbs of Porkey had an earache 
and the Royal Order of Oil Creek Township Owls 
had their Annual meeting. Wiener sandwiches and 
sauerkraut were served by the young ladies of the 
Female Department. 



St. Patrick's Day. Dombasle-en-Argonne. 

I am sitting before a fire in our quarters. It is 
quite a hot one for I have just put on the legs of an 
old oak bedstead and the polished top of a wrecked 
mahogany writing-desk. They burn well and make 
it much pleasanter here than it was at Jubecourt. 
Besides, ours is the best house remaining in the vil- 
lage. Practically all of the others fell in ruins during 
a heavy bombardment last fall. With the exception 
of a few road-menders we are the sole occupants of 
the place. The peasants were all forced to flee after 
the shelling. I understand that the Germans still 
punish it quite regularly. Naturally our life here 
ought to be interesting. 

When we arrived last Thursday, all of Section 
One's cars were lined up in the road opposite the 
cantonment and we had barely time to say "Hello" 
before they were speeding down the road towards 
Vadelaincourt. They will be "en repos" there for 
a couple of weeks. Then came a general scramble 
for rooms. Bradley and I stuck together and found 
a wonderful little shack behind the main building. 
We didn't have possession long, however, for our 
French Lieutenant had previously chosen it and we 

42 



"AMBULANCE 464" 43 

were forced to give it up to him. We tried the par- 
lor of the big house after this. It was pretty good 
except that the ceiling had recently fallen and left 
several inches of debris on the floor. But this was 
fine compared to the rooms some of the other fellows 
had. We went vigorously to work and in two hours 
had a fairly respectable place for our stretchers. 
Just after we had finished, two slackers joined us 
and we ended with a merry party of six in our par- 
lor. 

Yesterday morning Ott Kann was on duty at 
Montzeville and I went out with him to learn the 
road. It is sort of a relay or half way post between 
Dombasle and Esnes; and although Esnes is a mile 
and a half closer to the trenches, still Montzeville 
gets a good many blesses from the batteries and 
engineer's posts nearby. The town is in a much 
worse condition than Dombasle. Hardly a wall re- 
mains and the few soldiers who stay in the place, live 
deep underground in abris. We left Ott's blanket 
roll in the "Poste de Secours" and then climbed out 
into the open again to look around a little. We had 
just emerged when a terrific screech like the tearing 
of an enormous piece of cloth, sounded above us, a 
violent explosion occurred in the road in front of us 
and little stones and "eclat" came pattering down 
all around, but not before we had tumbled headlong 
down the abri entrance and were safe underground 



44 "AMBULANCE 464" 

once more. Three more shells fell outside and 
then, when nothing else happened for some time, we 
got our nerve back again and crawled slowly out. 
We poked around the ruins for a while until we got 
some distance from the post. Here on top of a pile 
of stones, once the walls of a little cottage, we gazed 
at the distant summit of a hill where French shells 
were breaking instead of German. For the enemy 
held the crest. This was the famous Mort Homme. 
Craig stopped by soon after this on his way to 
Esnes, and since Ott was on twenty-four hour duty 
here and there was no point in my staying with him, 
I went on with Craig, to learn the road. 

It was late in the afternoon when we got started. 
Immediately upon leaving the village we came into 
plain sight of the trenches. However, it happened 
that we were seen far more clearly by the enemy 
than we could possibly see him. We had to drive 
over an exposed road along the brow of a hill with 
the fields on either side of us speckled with shell- 
holes. Opposite us were the Boche trenches show- 
ing up in thin, white lines, which were occasionally 
marked by a puff of smoke from an exploding seven- 
ty-five. I experienced the same, shivery feeling here 
which one often has at home, before getting* up to 
make a speech in school. You try to tell your- 
self everything is all right, but still you seem to 
quiver all over. However, from the glances I stole 




. *-4 



M 



i. "Kelly's Corner" or "Strafen's Bend," on the Esnes road. Mort Homme (Dead 
Man's Hill) and the first line German trenches are visible in the distance. A volley of 
shells can be seen exploding in the field to the right. Edward Kelly was killed just a few 
yards from here in August, igi6. 

2. The rear of the chateau at Esnes. Each new Boche shell piles a little more refuse 
upon the abri, and thus makes the post below all the safer. 




H. W.-. PO 



"AMBULANCE 464" 45 

at Craig now and then, I knew that he was just as 
worked up as I was. This idea seemed to cheer me 
immensely and I felt much more at ease afterwards. 

We drove into Esnes, the little town where we 
have our "Poste de Secours," just after sunset, and 
what had once been peaceful homes rose before us 
in shattered walls and ugly piles of stones. In the 
whole place there was no building with its sides still 
intact, and very few which had any walls at all. 
It can never hope to be rebuilt. We were forced to 
drive slowly through the town, for barbed wire, 
waiting to be hauled to the trenches, lay about in 
huge piles, sometimes projecting out into the street; 
and big logs, to be used for dugout supports, were 
scattered about. Half a dozen fresh shell holes 
and an occasional arrive a hundred yards or so 
away added to the pleasure of the trip. We 
finally got to the old chateau where the post is lo- 
cated and had barely climbed out of the car when 
one of the stretcher-bearers met us, and said two 
couches were waiting. We carefully put them in, 
the brancardiers helping, and then in the dusk 
drove back with them to the Hospital at Ville. 
Craig went pretty slowly, in fact, the whole distance 
in low speed, but the poor chaps moaned all the 
way. 

Clark certainly has hard luck. Last night he was 
driving along the Post Two road in the Bois d'Avo- 



46 "AMBULANCE 464" 

court when he got stuck in a bad mud hole and had 
to wait there three hours before any help came. 
Just as he started on his way again a "210" exploded 
in the road, forty feet in front of him, splashed mud 
all over him and shook the whole car. He stopped 
and sat there shaking, he said, for five or ten min- 
utes. Finally he got his nerve back and went on to 
Ville sur Couzances, to the H. O. E. And after 
all this, when he was sitting before the fire in his 
quarters tonight, his roommate accidentally kicked 
over a pail of boiling water, resting on the coals. 
Most of it spilled on Clark's feet, and before they 
could get his socks off he was badly burned. He 
will probably be laid up for a month in the hos- 
pital. 



March 20th, In the abri of the Poste de 

Secours at Esnes. 

A little after noon on Sunday the heaviest bom- 
bardment we have yet heard started from our near- 
by batteries. Everyone of them from the soixante- 
quinze to the "380's" banged away for all it was 
worth and until midnight there was scarcely a sec- 
ond's interval between the shells. This was the tir 
de barrage, the preliminary to a big attack which we 
first thought was French but which afterwards turned 
out to be Boche against Hill 304 and Mort Homme. 
This naturally meant a lot of work for us and in the 
middle of the afternoon six or seven cars were called 
out and all the others were made ready to leave. 
(Four is the usual number sent out for our twenty- 
four hour stretches, three at their posts and one on 
call.) My own turn came at eleven o'clock when 
the work was getting heavier. They gave me the 
Esnes run, the one I had made with Craig and 
where I am now, waiting until a full load of blesses 
arrive. Of course we could use no lights and as the 
road was constantly being shelled I felt rather nerv- 
ous. We had been somewhat worked up that after- 
noon when Craig came in from Post Two, having 

47 



4 8 "AMBULANCE 464" 

seen ten men shot to pieces just one hundred yards in 
front of him in the Bois d'Avocourt; and Haven 
turned up a little later with a tale of a similar hap- 
pening in another place. Furthermore, there had 
been a big gas attack earlier in the afternoon and 
four or five of the fellows had been compelled to 
wear their masks. 

With these pleasant little stories to cheer me, I 
left our cantonment. I could not see the road, only 
an undefined streak a shade lighter than the sur- 
roundings, and I drove very slowly at first and blew 
my whistle at every dark spot on the horizon. Some- 
times these turned out to be trees but more often 
they were wagons bearing ammunition and supplies 
to the communicating trenches from which they are 
carried forward either by men or burros. It was 
very hard to see them and I had many close calls not 
only from collision but also from breaking my rear 
axle in the fresh shell holes between Montzeville and 
Esnes. I stopped for a moment at the former post 
and found McLane there. He had run into a huge 
log, obstructing the road between the two posts and 
had come back here to get help. Word had been sent 
to Crowhurst the mechanic who came out in Hous- 
ton's car. He arrived just after I did and as we 
were entering the abri, a shrapnel broke overhead 
and threw mud and eclat down the doorway. 

Eight or ten more shells fell in the town while I 



"AMBULANCE 464" 49 

was there and since they seemed to be after the con- 
voys of ammunition caissons which flew by on a 
gallop I also kept up a pretty good speed until I was 
out of the place. When I passed McLane's car there 
was a shrapnel hole in the cowl and a piece of eclat 
in the radiator. Logs were scattered all along the 
road and the shell-holes became more and more nu- 
merous. I managed to get to the chateau finally 
and found three grands blesses waiting for me out- 
side. I drove very slowly and carefully on my return 
trip, but sometimes I struck a bad hole which I 
hadn't seen and the poor fellows moaned and 
shrieked pathetically. I managed to get them into 
Dombasle finally. Llere I found there was no one 
to relay them on to the hospital at Ville and that 
I would have to take them myself. So I continued 
on through Brocourt and jubecourt to the H. O. E. 
at Ville where I left my wounded. Then I went back 
to Esnes again for more and kept on working until 
four o'clock the next afternoon. I didn't sleep for 
thirty-five hours and some of the men, those who 
had been on duty before, went four or five hours 
more than this. 

There were a lot of fresh shell holes just outside 
of Esnes on one of my trips the next afternoon. I 
certainly prayed as I passed them with my load of 
couches that God would help me back safely, at least 
to bring my car back without disaster. And I am 



50 "AMBULANCE 464" 

sure my prayer was answered, for five of our cars 
were broken down that night and four the next, some 
of them rather seriously. Two machines ran into 
ammunition wagons and four collided in the woods. 
There were also several minor accidents such as run- 
ning head on into a stone-wall or having a rear-wheel 
drop off. Of course, this seems like a good many, 
but I really think we were fortunate in not having 
any more trouble than we did. You can't expect to 
come out untouched on roads like these which make 
the worst stretch at home seem like the Lincoln high- 
way, and with fifteen cars out at once, the majority 
of them driven by inexperienced drivers. Further- 
more, the night was pitchblack and much of the way 
lay through thick woods. Then there w£re the 
lovely starshells which come up every minute or so 
and after lighting up the whole landscape for eight 
or ten seconds, die out and leave you half-blinded by 
the glare. 

The result of our two days' work, ending Tues ; 
day night, was three hundred and seventy-seven 
wounded, carried a total distance of ten thousand 
kilometers. Both sides suffered severely but very 
little ground changed hands; and when the whole 
affair was over the first line trenches were nothing 
except a mass of shell-holes, and in many places only 
fifteen feet apart. 

I have finally seen what I came over for, and a lot 



"AMBULANCE 464" 51 

more besides — war, real war, stripped of glory. 
For what chance has a man against a shell? And 
how' does the awful suffering of trench life compare 
with the thrilling battles of the Revolution. I don't 
mean that it doesn't take ten times the nerve and the 
endurance, but there's the rub, for we have become 
machines, not men. I know God will protect us over 
here, but you realize how absolutely weak and help- 
less you are when a load of dead are brought in, 
some with arms and legs gone, others with heads 
and trunks mixed together; and quite often you 
learn there wasn't anything left to bring. 

This matter of being under shellfire for the first 
time and of trying to drive back in the dark from 
Esnes, gives one a queer feeling. Payne told me on 
the boat coming over that he wasn't a Christian and 
that he didn't believe in prayer. But he said to 
me yesterday that he had prayed for the first time 
in his life out there on the Esnes road. Just as he 
was rounding "Kelly's Corner," a "77" landed in 
the road in front of him. Then two more shells 
came, one in the field to his right and the other a few 
yards behind him. "Why, Doolie," he said after- 
wards, "there wasn't anything else to do except to 
pray. I felt so little, so absolutely helpless, that I 
had to ask God for help. I got it too. That fourth 
shell didn't explode." 



March 24th. Dombasle once again. 

I crawled into my blankets here at three o'clock 
this morning. They sent me out about ten last eve- 
ning on a special call to Post Two. I had three 
runs down to Ville with some blesses from a Ger- 
man "coup de main" and this kept me going for 
some time. Fortunately there was a full moon or 
I would have had a terrible time in the woods. 

I had just enough pep to get up for breakfast and 
then was sorry that I did afterwards. It was pour- 
ing in torrents outside and the old dining-room 
leaked like a seive. There was nothing to do but 
put on our raincoats, and stand there in that deluge, 
trying to swallow a plate of half-cooked oatmeal. 
I am afraid that our meals will be below par for 
a few days. Andre, the cook, lucky fellow, has gone 
to Paris on his permission and one of the truck 
drivers has taken his place. His first meal wasn't 
much of a success. 

At last Section Douze has a mascot. Henny 
Houston stopped at Jubecourt today on his way 
back from Ville and got a little mongrel pup from 
his old friend Abigal in the Epicerie there. It was 

52 



"AMBULANCE 464" 53 

baptised after lunch with the name of "Montze- 
ville." Such a cute name for a dog. 

Cooky calls our habitation on Dombasle alley the 
"Den of Thieves" and he certainly is right. One 
would think we had been brought up along with Bill 
Sykes in Fagin's den. Our development into klep- 
tomaniacs began when Ott Kann hid underneath 
his bed about fifty pounds of time fuses and unex- 
ploded hand grenades which he had picked up near 
Esnes. We found out about it the same day the 
poor brancardier was killed, fooling with a grenade 
at Montzeville and it made us sort of nervous to 
see Ott sitting on his stretcher evenings banging 
away on his dainty little souvenirs with hammer 
and chisel. He appeared quite unconcerned but we 
weren't. The first time he tried it, the grating 
sound of the steel upon the brass and iron and the 
thought of what might happen if he struck a cap, 
caused us to implore him to stop. Finally, since Ott 
was immovable, we all turned in, hoping that, if the 
thing did explode, we would miss most of the frag- 
ments because we were lying down. Ott went to 
Post Two on the following day, and before he re- 
turned, his relics were resting comfortably at the 
bottom of a neighboring well. He immediately sus- 
pected Bradley, who was really innocent of the trick, 
and hid two of his three blankets just as the latter 
was starting for Esnes, on twenty-four hour duty. 



54 "AMBULANCE 464" 

Bradley almost froze that night at the chateau, and 
planned vengeance upon his return. Supposing Bar- 
ney to be the guilty party, from something that he 
had heard Ott say, he stole his shoes and a dozen 
packages of cigarettes which Barney had borrowed 
from Ott's suitcase the day before. Of course, this 
complicated matters and not even our stretchers 
were safe after this. My mirror, my sewing kit, 
and all my toilet articles disappeared one by one, 
only to reappear a few days later on Cookies shelf or 
tucked away among Ott's blankets. Strange to say, 
it wasn't all loss. Several times I have gone to bed 
with three blankets over me and found five there in 
the morning. And not a soul in the room would 
know anything about it. If Crowhurst makes a 
little paper cutter out of a compression band or 
perhaps a salt and pepper shaker from a Boche 
machine-gun bullet, and we feel that it would mean 
more to us than it would to him, we persuade our- 
selves that it is really ours and get possession of it 
at the first opportunity. We thought at first this 
kleptomania was confined to our own room; but it 
has spread throughout the section, even to the pluto- 
crats across the street. Stealing has become almost 
a virtue, as it was with the Spartans; you are a won- 
der if you can get away with it. But whatever 
happens, don't get caught. 

Barney Faith and I laid in a supply of wood this 



"AMBULANCE 464" 



55 



Brass Time Fuse from a German "77" (3 -inch Shell) 

(2) (3) (4) (5) (6) 








1. The time fuse assembled, ready to be screwed on to 
the shell proper. 

2. The top of the fuse which contains the spring and 
fulminate of mercury cap. The latter explodes from iner- 
tia on leaving the gun. 

3. First ring, with groove filled with powder which 
burns until it comes to hole in (4). It is ignited by the 
explosion of the cap in (2). 

4. Second ring, also filled with powder, which is ignited 
from (3) and which burns as far as the unit indicated on 
ring. This ring is set for the second at which it is de- 
sired that the shell shall explode over the enemy's lines. 

5. Base of time fuse. Upper part contains trigger and 
lower part tube through which the flame passes which 
explodes the shell itself. 

6. The covering over last part of passage. 



$6 "AMBULANCE 464" 

afternoon which ought to last us a month. But it 
is still pretty cold and Bradley and Cook keep the 
fireplace so well filled up that we have to have two 
or three cords on hand all the time. We keep it 
stacked up in the corner where the piano used to be. 
The two of us ran my ambulance down the street 
to the wreck of an old mansion, filled the back chuck 
full of banister pickets, assorted furniture and wains- 
coting which we tore from the walls, and carried 
it back to our one room apartment on the hill. 

It is twenty minutes to ten and we are still sitting 
around the fire. Crow pulled out his mouth-organ 
a little while again and is playing every ragtime he 
can think of. Cook has just received a long ex- 
pected check from home and is so happy about it that 
he is practising a clog dance on Ott Kann's bed. 
Ott is on duty at Post Three. 




i. The anti-aircraft "75." on the hill in Ste. Menehould. The audi-phone 
consists of a phonograph horn, a long hose, and a set of tightly strung wires. With this 
apparatus an enemy aeroplane motor can be heard ten miles away. 

2. Ste. *Menehould schoolboys, watching the gun above shelling a German plane 
12,000 feet above the city. 

3. Our apartments in Ste. Menehould. The stretcher with its regulation iron neck 
and ankle rest is covered with blankets full of little things. The four basins are used for 
developing pictures. 



March 26th. Esnes — The Winecellar of 

the old chateau. 

I stumbled into the morgue last night when I was 
trying to locate one of the brancardiers, out behind 
the chateau. It had been clear all evening and a 
beautiful moon was rising above the hill towards 
Montzeville. But its rays were not beautiful within 
the morgue. They showed far too clearly the man- 
gled limbs and bodies of a dozen Frenchmen who 
had been brought down from Mort Homme the 
night before. Here a rough gunny sack covered the 
decapitated trunk of a young machine-gunner; and 
alongside it lay the abdomen and legs of another 
poor poilu whose feet had already rotted away be- 
fore a kind Boche shell put him out of misery. Bou- 
vier told me several of them had been stuck in the 
mud out there for three days after the attack and al- 
though unwounded when shells were breaking all 
around them they had died of hunger and exposure. 
People at home think that we are making tremen- 
dous sacrifices to come over here and do this work. 
But they are nothing compared to those which the 
simple, uneducated poilu makes. 

57 



58 "AMBULANCE 464" 

When I was little, I used to spend hours over 
stories of wars in Egypt and France, in England 
and Russia. And I have thought since then how little 
truth there was in any of them; the fact that the 
war had been fought often being the only reason- 
ably true statement. The poilus have started on 
the same plan; and I presume in ten years a num- 
ber of books on exaggerated myths of the present 
war will be on sale. Nevertheless, their tales are in- 
teresting, and usually very exciting. We were all 
gathered in the abri at the post in Esnes last night, 
seven brancardiers and LeFevre and myself, when 
one of them sprung this story. He called it, "How 
the Crown Prince came to Esnes," and he says the 
affair occurred early in 19 15 when the war was still 
young and crossing the lines was not so difficult as 
it is now. It happened that the Boches were ham- 
mering away at Verdun as usual and were planning 
their big Spring offensive. If they could get all 
of Hill 304 and Mort Homme, besides Forts 
Douaumont and Vaux the game would almost be up 
for the French on the entire salient. So one dark 
night in February, the Crown Prince, who wasn't 
quite sure what forces the French had in this sector, 
decided to dash across himself in his staff car, shoot 
down over the hill into Esnes and get some informa- 
tion from one of the General's staff, a major in the 



"AMBULANCE 464" 59 

French Army, who was of course a spy. The old 
road from Montfaucon to Esnes was pretty badly 
torn by shell-fire at that time, but there wasn't a 
single trench cut through it. They were all bur- 
rowed under it. And as for barb-wire, they weren't 
using any yet on the hill. The prince and two of 
his intimate friends, dressed in French officers' uni- 
forms and driving a "Baby Peugeot," of Parisian 
manufacture, crossed the lines in a drizzling rain 
about midnight after a scouting party had given the 
"sehr girf } signal. They bounced from one shell 
crater to another down the narrow, winding road 
into the village. But they got to the chateau all 
right, where the headquarters were then. The three 
men entered the chateau, conferred with the major 
in his private abri and afterwards joked and drank 
healths with the other officers in the main apartment. 
But they stayed a trifle too long. The wine had its 
effect and the Crown Prince began to get a little 
careless with his French. But only one man had 
noticed it, for all the others were "happy," too. 
This was the sergeant on guard at the door. He 
tried to whisper in the commandant's ear but the 
old fellow pushed him away; and the colonel 
wouldn't even look at him. Suddenly the major en- 
tered, said that a message had come for the guests 
and would they please step outside for a moment. 



60 ''AMBULANCE 464" 

This was the last that was ever seen of them at Es- 
nes. But they know that the car carried four men 
back to Germany instead of the three which it 
brought over. And the sergeant was courtmartialled 
for not telling the colonel before it was too late. 



March 2$th, 19 17. Dombasle-en~Argonne, 

It is a few minutes before midnight. I have just 
returned from my twenty-four hours, which stretched 
into thirty this time, at Montzeville and Esnes. I 
dropped asleep last evening in the abri at the for- 
mer place and when I awoke early this morning I 
found myself lying fully dressed on a pile of straw 
with no blankets over me. Naturally I hadn't slept 
very well, but I felt I had been lucky not to have 
been called out at two or three o'clock. At seven 
I went over to the Poste de Secours abri and had 
breakfast with the brancardiers. They are the same 
men who were here last week except that there is 
one missing. Jean Picot, I think his name was, had 
his hand blown off recently by a grenade which he 
was trying to unload. He was evacuated to Ville 
sur Couzances but the chances for his recovery are 
very slight. Monsieur Guerin, the dapper little ad- 
jutant, is still here. As usual, he talked to me in 
English and I answered each time in French. He 
is quite serious about it, and corrects all of my mis- 
takes very carefully. 

Across the street from us was one of the army 
telephone exchanges. I watched them for some 
time this morning as they were trying to connect 

61 



62 "AMBULANCE 464" 

"Dead Man's Hill," Dugout Number Twenty- 
seven, with a busy Colonel's quarters in the 
Bois de Bethelainville. I couldn't make a great 
deal out of the conversation, so I soon left 
them and went into their kitchen. A middle- 
aged man with a rough, black beard stood beside the 
stove which happened to be one of the regulation 
army kitchen wagons placed in one corner of the 
room. I shouted "Bon jour f Monsieur" at him 
two or three times before he heard me. Finally he 
turned around and looked me over very carefully. 
Then (I think someone must have told him that an 
American Section was nearby) he burst out with, 
"Well I'll be darned. You are the first person from 
the States I have seen for eighteen months. What's 
your home town, anyway." He said it all so fast 
that I could not make him out for a minute. But 
I came to shortly and then it was my turn to ask 
questions. He told me that he had gone to America 
when he was seventeen, and settled in New York 
City. For some years, along with another French- 
man, he had conducted a well-known hair-dressing 
establishment on Fifth Avenue. When the war broke 
out he had debated for some time whether he ought 
to leave his family or not. But finally he couldn't 
stand it any longer; and so it happened that he 
sailed back to France in the fall of 19 14. We got 
into a long conversation; he wanted to know all 



"AMBULANCE 464" 63 

about America and what had happened there lately, 
and I was trying to find out more about him. Then 
in order to cement our friendship he offered me a 
cup of coffee flavored with a spoonful of their ter- 
rible cognac. It took a long time to get it down 
for it choked me if I swallowed much at once. But 
excepting his love for cognac, and eau de vie, he was 
a fine chap. I promised to look him up the next 
time I came to Montzeville. 

At four o'clock I rode up to Esnes with only an 
occasional shell dropping near; but the French were 
peppering Mort Homme and I hurried along in 
order to get to the Chateau before the Boche began 
to reply. Fifteen or twenty shells dropped around 
the post a few minutes after I arrived but I was 
in the abri by that time. 

Chauvenet has just come in from Post Two. On 
his way out a u 2io" landed in the middle of the road 
just in front of his car and a great piece of steel 
tore through the top of his car not ten inches from 
his head, and dropped into the back of the ambu- 
lance. He did not know that the car had been 
touched until half an hour later, for he was so 
stunned by the force of the explosion and so over- 
come by the gases of the shell through which he was 
forced to ride that he barely got out alive. Every- 
one is envious and wishes that it had happened to 
him — at least they say so. 



64 ''AMBULANCE 464" 

I picked up a chap near Brocourt today who was 
on his way back to Mort Homme after his permis- 
sion. He had walked all the way from Bar-le-Duc 
that day and was all tired out. He was mighty 
glad to get the ride for he had orders to be back 
in his company before midnight. We talked for a 
while in jerky little sentences; I, using the usual 
"ri est ce pas" and "Comprenez — vous" and he al- 
ways relying on "C 'est la Guerre" for an ^answer 
to my questions. At one place we passed a flock of 
strange birds. I pointed to them and mumbled 
something to signify that I wanted to know what 
they were. He simply said "oiseaa" and I replied 
as well as I could that we didn't have any oiseaus in 
America. He looked rather surprised and muttered 
something about having always heard that Etats 
Unis was a queer sort of a place. I discovered when 
I got back to the cantonment that the word oiseau 
means bird. 

Cook relieved me at nine o'clock, saying that 
three big "boys" had fallen near him as he passed 
through Montzeville. This was a pleasant send off 
and I pictured a delightful little journey back to 
Dombasle. But the stars were out when I started 
and a sprinkling of snow upon the ground made it 
very easy to keep on the road. I had only one blesse, 
for things were quiet in the trenches today. 



March 30. Dombasle again. 

Harry came in at four this morning and got 
Crowhurst and me out of bed. Haven's car had 
broken down near Esnes and we were to go out in 
464 to fix it. Coan went along with us. We found 
it straddling an old stone wall not far from the post. 
He had wandered off the road and run square into 
it when a star shell went out and left him in total 
darkness. The front axle was badly bent and the 
triangle rod was almost tied in a knot. Of course 
we couldn't straighten the axle but we put in a new 
rod in the dark and managed to tow the car home. 
The blesses with which he had started out had in 
the meanwhile been transferred to another car and 
taken to Ville. 

Thursday night the blesses from the morning at- 
tack began to pile in at Esnes. I went on at eight 
o'clock as a reserve. The first time down I had 
one couche who couldn't stand the pain. He almost 
drove me crazy with his shrieking and yells of "For 
God's Sake, Stop." And several times when I hap- 
pened to hit a shell hole or a log accidentally, he ac- 
tually rose up in his agony and pounded with his 
bare fists upon the wall of the ambulance. But I 

65 



66 "AMBULANCE 464" 

knew that I couldn't help him by stopping, and I felt 
that I might save his life if I hurried. After I got out 
of Montzeville, he quieted down and I supposed this 
was because the road was so much smoother. But 
not until I stopped in front of the hospital at Ville 
did I learn the truth. The poor fellow had died on 
the road. Soon after this Haven and Allen collided 
in the Bethelainville Woods. I took Jim out in my 
car to get them in. I left him here with Haven to 
work on the cars and went on by myself to Esnes. 
It was certainly an awful night, dark as pitch and a 
sleety rain blowing into my eyes. However, I got 
through by God's help, passing Dunham's car which 
was laid up with a broken rear axle just outside the 
woods. I waited two hours at the post for couches, 
Tenney and Houston leaving with their loads before 
me. Some sad cases were brought in while we were 
waiting. One fellow, with his foot almost severed 
at the ankle, lay there without a whimper while they 
amputated it. Another man with his head caved in 
like an old cantaloupe, lay beside him. He looked 
hopeless but the doctors bandaged him and sent him 
to Ville. 

I was doing my best to dodge a couple of shell 
holes near Strafen's corner (one of the spots the 
Boches love to pepper) on my last trip tonight when 
I overtook a poor courier, walking, and pushing his 
bicycle beside him through the mud. We drivers are 



"AMBULANCE 464" 67 

not supposed to carry any soldiers and this wasn't 
an ideal place to stop. But the poor fellow was 
dead tired and I knew if he felt worse than I did 
he'd be mighty thankful for a lift. So I pulled on 
my emergency and yelled to him to throw his bike 
over the hood and jump in himself if he wanted a 
ride down to Dombasle. ... I left him saying 
"Merely Monsieur, Merci," outside of the village 
just at sunrise and went on to Ville with my blesses. 
I got back to the cantonment at 6 130, having had no 
rest for more than thirty hours and getting some- 
thing like five hours sleep in the last fifty. Two of 
the men had been on duty at Post Two before, and 
worked for more than forty hours without sleep. 

A wonderful surprise came today, a box from 
home. Besides a lot of food which included twenty 
packages of chewing gum, some crackers and a two 
pound box of chocolates which disappeared like bran- 
cardiers when a shell whistles, there were a dozen 
magazines, a pair of shoes, a compass which I will 
probably use more in Paris than out here, and some 
good photographic paper which I can't get in France. 
The crackers lasted five minutes, the candy until 
supper time, and I have one package of gum left. 
But no matter how fast the stuff disappeared, it was 
certainly great fun getting it. 



March 31. Dombasle 

While I was snoozing comfortably in my car 
today, Gilmore started the motor and had driven 
out of the cantonment before I realized what he was 
doing. I think he wanted to prove to me that a 
couche has no easy ride in one of our ambulances, 
for he went over curbstones and rock-piles and into 
ditches and shell holes, like those which we run into 
on the Esnes road. The jar was terrific. Some- 
times it shook my body all over; and again when we 
hit a sharp bump, like the curb, my feet, along with 
the whole rear end of the stretcher, were thrown 
twelve inches into the air and then fell with a crash 
onto the floor of the car. 

I wonder what the girls back home would think 
of the love-letter reading contest we had in our 
room tonight. There were four of us there, Eaton, 
Payne, Frazer and I, sitting around the fire and 
having a terrible debate over whether or not the 
Boston Post had the second largest morning circu- 
lation in the country. Eaton swore that it had, be- 
cause he had worked on it for a month about five 
years ago. He rashly offered ten to one odds, and 
all three of us took him up at fifty francs apiece. 
We intended to prove it by my Almanac which 

68 



"AMBULANCE 464" 69 

the family notified me recently had been sent by 
parcel post. Then the conversation switched to 
girls and old Payne claimed he had the most 
devoted one in all California. Frazer began 
boasting about his, and before we knew it, they were 
pulling out their respective letters and each was 
trying to prove that his was far more in love with 
him than the other. Eaton and I were to act as 
judges. Payne's turned out to be a nice, sensible 
girl who had just had the measles, and said "Dear 
Mart," and u Oh I wish you were here," and "As 
ever yours, Dinah." . . . Frazer's was a bright 
little thing, very peppy and with lots of interesting 
things to say. But she didn't rant much about her 
love, and couldn't have used the word "Dear" more 
than three or four times in the body of the letter. 
Eaton wouldn't wait long enough to hand out a de- 
cision after this. He pulled open one of his own and 
it beat the other two all hollow. His beloved began 
with "Dearest, darling, honeybunchingest, lovey- 
dovey Robinson," and filled up the whole affair with 
such absolute nonsense on how she couldn't stand his 
absence another minute and how she wanted to fly 
to him, that we were shrieking with laughter before 
he had read five lines. He got the prize which hap- 
pened to be a forty pound pot of lead melted from 
shrapnel balls. He can lug it back to America if 
he wishes. 



April Fool's Day. Midnight — In the ahri at Post 

Two 

I was sent out here exactly nineteen hours ago to 
find Ray Eaton. He had gone to Post Three two 
hours before that, on a special call and hadn't been 
heard of since he left there with a load of couches. 
Now Bois d'Avocourt is divided into innumerable lit- 
tle squares by dozens of military roads which lead 
from battery to battery and from one cantonment to 
another. Some of them are in a frightful condition 
and we figured that Ray had strayed into one of 
these and gotten stuck. It was just by chance that 
I found him. I came to a crossroads, turned to the 
right when I should have kept straight ahead and 
discovered his car at the foot of a steep hill. He 
explained what had happened in a few words. His 
clutch had given out completely when he started up 
the hill and after backing down to the bottom in 
neutral, he found his reverse wouldn't pull at all. 
And furthermore it would have been extremely diffi- 
cult to have turned around in the dark upon this 
muddy, narrow road, especially with the load of 
blesses which he had. Several times during his long 
wait he had walked back to the main road, thinking 

70 



"AMBULANCE 464" 71 

one of the other cars might be passing; but none had 
come and of course he did not dare to leave his 
wounded alone for any length of time. I managed 
to get 464 back to back with his machine and to- 
gether we changed the couches. The lower two 
were easy enough but it took every ounce of our 
strength to lift the third blesse up to the top rack of 
the ambulance. After I had closed the back I 
watched Coan as he tried to climb the hill. Minus 
the heavy burden he succeeded in making the ascent 
and a minute later disappeared over the crest. After 
running down to Ville with my load I came back to 
Post Three and then on to Two. By this time it was 
six o'clock, so late that I didn't lie down at all. I 
put a couple of sticks on the fire and dozed on a stool 
in front of it until the brancardiers awakened and 
started their breakfast of bread and coffee. While 
we were eating I read a letter which came yesterday 
from Tony Cucuron, the young artilleryman whom 
I met in Brillon six weeks ago. He had prom- 
ised then to write to me in English, because he 
thought it would be easier for me to read. I am 
quoting it below for I think it expresses very clearly 
the feelings of a boy, sick and tired of the war. Of 
course he has made a number of mistakes in gram- 
mar but considering the short time he studied Eng- 
lish he did remarkably well. Here it is : 



72 "AMBULANCE 464" 

The Thirteenth of March, 

Dear sir and friend, The French Front 

I am sure you wil forget me for not writing for 
some week. Here as you know we are never free. 

It is too difficult and besides we are so tired that 
we have no courage to write. Now, I am on the 
front and our guns are not far from the German's 
trenches. I should not tell you news about my life 
for you know what it is. Our life, it is sad and dull, 
and we are awaiting for the end of the war. I am 
some little happy for I hope and think the day is at 
hand. It is too the opinion of the whole part. I 
longe anxiously to return home, my heart aches to 
be far from my native town. 

It is a very sweet country with a blue and sunny 
sky. After the war I will return home and then end 
my studies at the "Universite de Droit" of Tou- 
louse. I do not know what your feelings are about 
what I am saying, but I suppose you also are in a 
hurry to return home or for the less to see the war 
over. 

Perhaps you wish to go to England or to settle in 
France. I like very, very our brotherland and after 
the war I wil spend three or six months in London. 
My dear friend, you see that I keep my promises — 
I have written. Please write often it is the sincere 
desire of yours very truly, 

Tony Cucuron. 




i. The gasoline locomotive and train of the narrow-gauge railway which carry shells 
and supplies up to the lines. v 

2. Brancardiers putting a couche (stretcher case) in the ambulance at St. Thomas. 

3. " 464" and her driver. Directly above the hood, on the wall behind, is posted 
President Wilson's Message of April 2nd, 191 7. 






/ 1 
u 








''AMBULANCE 464" 73 

During the forenoon I waited around outside the 
abri and since no blesses seemed to be forthcoming, 
I strolled over to an observation tree several hun- 
dred yards distant. It was a big beech, more than 
sixty feet high, and appeared to have a small 
screened platform in the topmost branches. When 
I had climbed up about thirty steps I came to a place 
where a shell had torn away half of the trunk; but it 
seemed solid enough so I took a chance and went on 
to the top. From here I could see for miles over the 
front, beginning with Mort Homme on the right, 
then across Hill 304, Avocourt, and the surrounding 
forest and ending with the plateau above Vauquois. 
It was wonderfully interesting to me to watch the 
crude, zig-zag lines twisting in and out among the 
hills and valleys. I was only sorry that I hadn't 
a pair of field glasses along. They would have made 
it easier to see the trenches and some of the "150's" 
bursting in the valley beyond me would also have 
shown up more clearly. 

McLane who had been spending the night at Post 
Three, got a bogus telephone message to come up 
here for a wounded officer and dropped in about 
noon. Not a blesse had arrived for hours so we 
talked for a while and finally started to dig for fusees 
and compression bands in the fresh shell holes be- 
hind the post. There was one only a few hours old 
in which we were particularly interested. We 



74 "AMBULANCE 464" 

hadn't begun to dig before we discovered that a 
"gas" shell had fallen here. And it was tear gas at 
that. Water literally rolled from our eyes and this 
was soon followed by an awful choking sensation. 
We put on our gas masks immediately and from 
then on, until we found the base of the shell, buried 
several feet underground, we didn't remove the 
masks at all. We had to work very slowly, for the 
air is filtered through in such small quantities, that 
you can't breathe as you normally do when working. 

Note. A month later: I carried the steel base, 
half full of clay, back to Dombasle, and during all 
the weeks we stayed here it never lost its gassy odor. 

A couple of poilus and I had a grand time trying 
to say a few simple things to one another tonight. 
We sat before the fire in the damp abri where I am 
now writing and where the smoke hangs down from 
the ceiling in a cloud two feet thick. (You have to 
crawl on your hands and knees when you move about 
in the room.) While I was getting in deep over 
some complicated idea which I wanted to impart to 
them, and was gesticulating wildly to explain it, a 
brancardier tapped me lightly on the shoulder and 
said — "Encore des Blesses, Monsieur/' I reluct- 
antly put on my heavy canvas mackinaw and went 
out into the night. The brancardiers had already 
shoved the stretchers into the car and closed up the 
back when I arrived. I filled my radiator as usual 



''AMBULANCE 464" 75 

from my reserve can, (it is still so cold that we are 
obliged to drain the water every time we stop the 
motor for more than a minute or so), gave her one 
twist and started off for Ville. 

It was frightfully dark in the woods and every 
now and then I stopped my car, got out and 
looked about to see if I were still on the road. 
At the first crossroads I almost ran down a four 
horse artillery caisson; after that I kept my lit- 
tle tin whistle going pretty steadily, and fully half 
a dozen times a shrill return came back out of the 
night when I saw nothing at all. But at the fork 
near Post Four my luck failed me. Instead of bear- 
ing to the left to go to Dombasle, I missed the turn 
entirely and headed in the other direction. When I 
discovered my error it was too late to go back. I 
had never been over the road that I was now on, and 
it was darker than ever. I could only see a few feet 
beyond the radiator cap. But I remembered from 
my map that it led to Recicourt; and I knew that 
from there on to Dombasle I could go on the main 
Verdun-Sainte Menehould highway. I drove very 
slowly, at times not more than four miles an hour, 
until I was safely down the long hill leading into the 
village. There wasn't a truck, not even a ravitaille- 
ment cart on the highway and I speeded up to fif- 
teen miles an hour. 

I got to Dombasle without any more trouble, 



76 "AMBULANCE 464" 

stopped for a second at the Doctor's office to tell 
the man on call to take my place at Post Two, 
and set off again for Ville. My eyes were very 
tired from the strain of constantly peering through 
the darkness and so when I came to the "Eteignez 
les lumieres blanches" sign on the hill outside of Bro- 
court (this town is about ten miles from the first 
lines, and about as close as lights can be used 
safely) I stopped a minute to throw on my head- 
lights. But in doing so I took all the pressure off 
the footbrake and a few seconds later, when I 
turned on the switch and the lights illuminated the 
road ahead, I found the whole car going rapidly 
backwards down the hill. I jammed on the emer- 
gency brake and all three foot pedals and the car 
came to an abrupt halt a few feet farther down. I 
got out of my seat to see where I was, and discov- 
ered that the rear wheels of the machine were at the 
top of a steep bank over which we would have tum- 
bled if we had gone six inches further. I made a 
silent prayer as we started up the hill, thanking God 
for saving us from disaster. 

At Ville I put the patients into the hands of 
a couple of attendants who carried them into 
a large waiting room and after examining the 
tickets pinned to each of their coats, which gave 
the nature of the injury, they carried the poor fel- 
lows off to their respective wards. 



"AMBULANCE 464" 77 

Then I went out into the night again and turned 
old 464 towards Post Two. It was a great treat rid- 
ing with my headlights on full blast and I hated 
to turn them off again at Brocourt. It became 
very difficult driving after this, and I was almost 
sorry that I had used my lights at all, for my 
eyes had grown accustomed to the glare and it was 
fully five minutes before I could see the road at all. 
I got along all right for a mile or so after this, but 
when I neared the long hill leading down into the 
village of Dombasle, my sight failed me completely. 
The car seemed to be hitting an endless series of 
great "thank you mam's" which shot the front 
wheels high up in the air and brought them down 
with a terrific crash onto the stony road. To save my 
life, I couldn't see what the trouble was or what the 
obstacles blocking the road were. I went pounding 
on Sown the hill, hanging on to the wheel for dear 
life as I bounced from one of these awful things to 
another. And finally, when a speck of moon peeped 
out from behind a cloud, I saw what was causing the 
trouble. There, spread out carefully on each side 
of the road, at intervals of perhaps twenty-five feet, 
were piles of crushed rock, ten or twelve inches high, 
which the repairers had dumped there. I had been 
trying to straddle these as I came down and would 
have soon run smack into the bank if my old friend, 
the moon, hadn't appeared. 



78 "AMBULANCE 464" 

I am back again at Post Two now, safe and 
sound. But it is no longer midnight as I headed the 
first page of today's diary. My watch tells me that 
I have been writing for two hours. I had intended 
to go to bed after I had finished this but my good 
friend Angeron, the brancardier, says no. There 
are Encore des Blesses outside. 



April 5, 19 17. Post Two again. 

It is eight-thirty, an hour past the regular time 
for the relief man to show up, and still no one has 
come. We no longer change shifts at four in the 
afternoon, as we used to when we first went to 
Esnes. The Boches have been deliberately firing on 
our ambulances lately, and we now change runs in 
the dark, in order to avoid any unnecessary driving 
in daylight. Most of us would really rather take 
the run in daytime, for with all due respect to Ger- 
man shells, it is no fun going over the old road in the 
dark. 

I brought my own blanket roll, hoping to have a 
quiet sleep, but they brought in "frozen feet" all 
night long and I had to carry them back to Ville. I 
made seven runs altogether and carried thirty 
blesses. If I remember rightly, only four of them 
were couches. All the remainder had that awful 
disease "Pied gele," where the foot slowly rots 
away, and leaves the bone bare. 

I sat in a shell hole outside of the abri for a while 
this afternoon, watching the Boches pepper one of 
our "150" batteries about two hundred yards behind 
me. They shelled it for over an hour, and I had a 

79 



80 "AMBULANCE 464" 

grand time listening to each projectile as it whistled 
over my head, and broke a few seconds later in the 
woods beyond. I discovered, as it grew darker and 
I could see the flash of the exploding shell, that the 
noise from this took several seconds to come to me, 
after the explosion. And more than that, I noticed 
that the whistle continued for a short length of time 
after the shell had actually exploded. Therefore I 
naturally concluded from this that the nearer you 
were to an exploding projectile, the shorter would be 
the whistle; and that it would be impossible to hear 
at all the approach of a very close shell. 

At supper tonight the good news came, which we, 
and especially the Frenchmen, have been waiting to 
hear for months — "Les Etats Unis ont declare la 
guerre contre rAllemagne." One of the bran- 
cardiers returning from his furlough in Paris, 
broke the news to us. We were all below in the 
abri, making a great uproar over "soupe" (a poilu 
can make more noise over a plate of hot soup than 
any other human being) when he came rushing 
down the muddy stairs and shouted to us what had 
happened. Soupe was forgotten for the moment, 
as we plied him with questions and pored over the 
copies of "Le Parisien" and "Le Matin" which he 
gave to us. So America was really in the war; 
President Wilson had made a great speech in Con- 
gress and denounced Germany; no longer would 



"AMBULANCE 464" 81 

France regard her chances of final victory as slim. 
And each one of those simple poilus wrung my hand, 
and asked me if I didn't think we would have our 
troops here soon. I don't believe I was ever 
prouder of America than at that moment; and as 
they pointed to a faded old banner, hanging from 
their smoke-blackened ceiling, in which one could 
barely distinguish the colors, and I showed them the 
little American flag, pinned to my coat — we realized 
that the "Bleu, blanc et rouge" and the "Red, 
White, and Blue," were one and the same thing. 

We talked together, or rather tried to talk, for a 
long time after the meal was over; finally I went out- 
doors, for I thought Cooky, or whoever was to re- 
lieve me, might be here already. And as I walked 
through the trees, I thought of many things, of Eu- 
rope when the war would be over, of home, and if I 
would ever see it again. Suddenly I stumbled, and 
looking down to see what had tripped me, I saw a 
pile of dead soldiers, mangled by shell beyond all 
recognition. Some had been torn in two at the 
waist, and of others, very little but the head and 
shoulders remained. But they were Frenchmen, 
they had given all they had for France, and they 
must be treated accordingly. Tomorrow morning 
the priest would come to get the few personal effects 
of each man so that he could wrap them up and send 
them to their respective families. Sometimes these 



82 "AMBULANCE 464" 

packages were very small, containing, perhaps, only 
a knife, a few cigarettes, and a wallet; but I have 
never seen one which didn't contain the pictures of 
his loved ones. After this a couple of brancardiers 
will dig a rude grave nearby, the priest will say a 
few last words, the grave will be filled with earth, 
and a little wooden cross placed at the head to mark 
the spot. 

I hear someone coming now. He has his exhaust 
pipe disconnected and is making a terrible fuss. It 
sounds like "Percy Pyne, of Princeton," (name-plate 
on the car) and if so, then it's Cooky, so "assez au- 
jourd'hiri." 



April 6. Esnes again. 

I am on duty at Esnes again and am using a few 
leisure moments, trying to write by candlelight in 
Le Fevre the chemist's cabin. It was once the vault 
of a deep wine-cellar, but now, with the ruins of the 
chateau piled upon it, it forms a very respectable 
abri. 

Last night I carried two couches to Ville from 
here, and on the way back, I stopped at Jubecourt 
to see if I could buy a little wine which M. Bouvier 
wants for mass on Easter Sunday. The main street 
of the village is on a steep grade. I pulled up op- 
posite the Epicerie and leaving the motor running, 
I wandered around the neighborhood to see if I 
could get the "Vin Rouge." But when I found all 
the inhabitants in bed, I returned to the spot where 
I left the car. To my dismay it was no longer there. 
And looking about, endeavoring to find what had be- 
come of it, I saw several hundred yards down the 
hill, the indistinct form of an ambulance ; I ran down 
to it and found it up against the stone wall of a 
house. I thought surely the front axle would be 
twisted or a wheel taken off; but luckily it had not 
attained any great speed on the way down, and had 

83 



8 4 "AMBULANCE 464" 

hit the wall rather gently. Except for the triangle 
being slightly bent, the car was unhurt. I suppose 
the vibrations of the motor running idle finally loos- 
ened the emergency brake, and since it was on a 
steep decline the car had started forward. 

I had quite a busy night. The trip to Esnes was 
very slow on account of the hundreds of ammunition 
wagons, and companies of reserve troops which 
blocked the road. Finally I arrived at the post and 
slept for two hours before I was called out with a 
"grand couche." I drove pretty slowly but got 
stuck somehow in a new shell-hole near the entrance 
to the chateau. I couldn't budge the machine by 
myself, so I had to get my assis out to help me. 
They weren't very enthusiastic about the job, since 
they were suffering from their wounds, but they 
pushed as hard as they could, while I put on 
the power; and after three or four trials, the flivver 
climbed over the edge in fine shape. I carried 
the blesses as usual to Ville, and then returned to 
Montzeville. All the brancardiers were asleep 
here. I found a stretcher in one corner and a couple 
of blesse blankets on the straw. They were blood- 
stained and dirty, but in the dampness of the abri, 
much better than no covering at all. I curled up in 
them and managed to sleep until Craig came in at 
three o'clock and sent me back to Esnes. They 







i. The "Po5te de Secours" at La Harazee. This station is the closest to the Boches 
that we ever had. It is less than 300 yards over the hill to "No Man's Land." 

2. A firing trench and hand grenade post. The sign "PP3X"is the name of the trench. 

3. Two poilus, one with a sun shade, resting in a front line trench on a hot summer 
afternoon. It is just 100 yards to the Boches from here. 



"AMBULANCE 464" 85 

pulled me out of bed here a few hours later, with 
another load. 

The Boches are shelling "Strafen Corner" consid- 
erably now. Half a dozen new holes have sprung 
up in the road itself overnight and there are twenty 
or thirty more on either side. But the town itself 
is worse. Every night it is crowded with burros, 
troops, supplies, and ammunition caissons going in 
every imaginable direction. I got caught in the jam 
near the barbed-wire stores last night and had to 
wait ten minutes until the road was clear once more. 
I shouldn't want to be a traffic cop in this place. Six 
roadworkers were killed here by one shell last week, 
and one of the officers from the post was wounded 
by shrapnel yesterday. 

I am down in Le Fevre's abri, waiting for Faith 
to relieve me. I hope he gets through the village all 
right. Six or seven volleys of four shells apiece 
have fallen there during the last twenty minutes. I 
guess there won't be so many coming when I leave, 
for they have been working pretty steadily. I hear 
Faith's whistle outside now. It means back to 
Dombasle and a good night's rest. 



April 7. Dombasle. 

Chauvenet left today for Salonique; he goes on 
the mail truck Bar-le-Duc, then to Paris and Mar- 
seilles by railroad, and finally on a slow little Medi- 
terranean freighter to Greece. I was sorry to see 
him go. I will never forget our walk together last 
Friday when we visited the sausage beyond Jouy 
and ate our meagre lunch of bread and confiture in 
the woods behind it. Later we walked to the sum- 
mit of the big hill overlooking Bethelainville. We 
went cross country all the way, and at one place 
happened to wander across a lonely rifle range where 
a company of young soldiers were busy practising. 
Luckily they saw us in time, and we came out un- 
touched. Further on, at the top of the hill above 
the village, we got a marvelous view of Mort 
Homme and could make out very clearly the two 
lines of trenches stretching along its sides. Beyond 
lay the Bois de Corbeaux and at its foot the ruins of 
Chattancourt. To the left, miles behind, we could 
distinguish the towers of lofty Montfaucon. Fort 
Douaumont was over the hills on the right, and we 
could see the outskirts of Verdun which lay hidden in 
the valley of the Meuse. In the foreground, we 

86 



-'AMBULANCE 464" 87 

could make out the French second and third line 
trenches, and here and there about Vigneville a 
"soixante quinze" shot out a jut of flame. The! 
French had a number of sausages up, and we were 
able to pick out two Boche balloons, far behind their 
own lines. There were a few shells bursting in the 
valley and big puffs of smoke rose regularly from 
Mort Homme. The artillery never seems to stop 
work here. 

Gilmore and I go souvenir-hunting regularly now. 
We explored the old munition depot yesterday which 
a Boche aviator blew up last summer. There were 
40,000 loaded shells, both shrapnel and high explo- 
sive, stored there, and hundreds of empty casings, 
fuses, and douilles. They all went up together be- 
cause of one measly bomb. We brought home a 
quart of shrapnel, and a number of compression 
bands. 

Gilmore has found the tip of a "380," (it weighs 
about forty pounds) and also enough parts of a 
"75" to construct the whole shell. Everybody seems 
to have gone souvenir-crazy. Not only do we bring 
in all sorts of junk from the posts, but we spend 
every minute here making briquets, paper knives, 
aluminum rings, and various do-dads from Boche 
bullets. Whenever anyone brings in a hand grenade 
or a time fuse we always take the thing apart. It's 
taking a terrible chance, but we seem to forget the 



88 "AMBULANCE 464" 

present and look forward to our happy homes in 
years to come, with the relics we brought from Dom- 
basle reposing on the mantlepiece. My best souve- 
nir so far is an old cavalry sword I got in Jube- 
court. It is over four feet long, has a wonderful 
edge, and dates back to 1822. I got it for a franc 
from an old man who seemed very anxious to get rid 
of it and all he asked was enough money to buy a 
bottle of cheap wine. I think some officer left it 
there by mistake and never returned for it. It is a 
fine souvenir and I hope I can get it back to America. 

There is a little attack on tonight, probably in the 
sector west of Avocourt. I hope it won't fill up 
Post Two and get me out of bed around three o'clock 
tomorrow morning. 

Just before I started writing tonight, while I was 
rummaging around my suitcase for a clean pair of 
underclothes — (I haven't changed them since I 
wouldn't like to say how long) — I found, in the toe 
of one of my socks, an egg, which I bought for the 
party in Jubecourt three weeks ago and never used. 
Immediately I decided to fry it; I put some mahog- 
any table legs on the fire (they make wonderful 
coals) and borrowed Gilmore's shellcasing dish to 
use as a frying pan. I had my Ford pliers for a 
handle. But just after I had broken the egg, I 
noticed that I had no lard. The kitchen was locked 
up securely and all the Ford axle grease was packed 



"AMBULANCE 464" 89 

away in the White truck. Suddenly I remembered 
that I had a jar of vaseline, which I had brought 
with me from America. I dug it out of my duffle- 
bag, rubbed it a little on the pan, dumped on the egg 
and put it on the fire to cook. Two minutes later I 
was munching the result, a crisp, savory egg; the 
slight oil-refinery flavor made me homesick for 
Pennsylvania. But this in no way prevented me 
from enjoying it immensely. 



April 10th, 19 17. Dombasle 

Powell came back on the mail truck today from 
Bar-le-Duc where he has been ever since we left 
Longeville, recuperating from a severe attack of 
pneumonia. Before we could tell him about the at- 
tacks we had been through and the all too frequent 
"tir de barrage" he burst out with "Say, fellows, 
you ought to have heard that big explosion from 
over the hills a few minutes ago. It must have been 
a shell going off." 

Ott's love for souvenirs almost finished him this 
morning. It seems that some poilu gave him a little 
round iron cylinder with two little screws on the end, 
for a present. He brought it back to Dombasle and 
told us that he had been given this little thing to use 
as a gasoline lamp. When he took out one of the 
screws a queer, yellowish powder came out and he 
put it in a pan of essence and set it on fire just to 
see what would happen. Luckily he had enough 
sense to move away, for the cylinder, which was of 
course a rifle grenade, exploded and tore a hole in 
the ground as large as a bushel basket. The French 
mechanics and Decupert, the lieutenant's secretary, 
none of whom have been up near the trenches, felt 

90 



"AMBULANCE 464" 91 

sure the Boches were shelling the village again and 
wouldn't leave their abri for fully an hour. 

It rather pleases us to learn that the French- 
men are just as scared as we are when they go 
out under fire for the first time. When we were 
putting a whole new front system on Haven's car 
near the entrance to the chateau the night of the 
second attack, August and Leon were there to help. 
Every time when Leon would start to use his ham- 
mer, August would seize his arm and say "Douce- 
ment, the Boches are just behind that house and they 
will get us with hand grenades if we make any 
noise." Then, before we were through a heavy bom- 
bardment started up behind the church, perhaps one 
hundred and fifty yards away. And each time that 
we heard the whistling of a shell someone would 
yell "Duck fellows, it's a big boy this time." August 
and Leon seemed to understand perfectly; at men- 
tion of the word "duck" they would always disap- 
pear beneath the ambulance, and remain there until 
all was quiet again. To tell the truth however, it 
isn't much fun waiting around with nothing to do 
while a car is being repaired. It's bad enough when 
you are busy working on the car. But when you 
have to wait for someone else to finish a job, you get 
a little nervous, especially when they are peppering 
the road. The star shells also worry one. You 
feel that the Boches have spotted you each time and 



92 "AMBULANCE 464" 

you try to figure the number of seconds before a 
shell will arrive. ... If we find it is impossible 
to repair a car sufficiently to tow it back to Dom- 
basle, or even to Montzeville, it has to be left out 
there on the road to the mercy of the enemy. If 
they don't shell it, we fix it up the next evening; but 
if they do, it's Good-bye, Ambulance. 



April 1 2th. Dombasle. 

We are to leave soon for "repos," going to some 
village southwest of here. We may go tomorrow, 
or perhaps the next day; but at all events, our so- 
journ here will soon be over, and we will never 
return. The division has suffered tremendously and 
they certainly deserve a rest. 

Five of our men got the "Croix de guerre" for 
work during the first two attacks. We had hoped 
that the section as a whole would be cited, instead 
of certain individuals being picked out from the rest. 
But it didn't happen that way. Houston, Craig, 
McLane, Walker and Gillespie were the lucky fel- 
lows. Their citations came yesterday afternoon 
from the general of the division and we celebrated 
in the evening with a big dinner. 

The sausage at Jouy was brought down this morn- 
ing by a Boche aviator. I was standing outside the 
cantonment with "Ott" Kann when the anti-aircraft 
gun started. Soon we caught sight of a tiny Ger- 
man plane, ten or twelve thousand feet above us. 
He was heading straight for the balloon, and 
descending so rapidly that for a while we thought he 
was falling. By this time the pilot of the sausage 

93 



94 "AMBULANCE 464" 

had signaled his men on the ground of his danger 
and the great drum was reeling in wire cable at the 
rate of twenty miles an hour. But this was not fast 
enough to escape from the hands of the clever avia- 
tor. For suddenly, while he was still a thousand 
yards above the balloon, he opened up his machine 
gun. We could hear its rat-tat-tats very clearly, al- 
though he was five miles away. Two or three of the 
flaming bullets happened to pierce the hydrogen bag, 
and in an instant it was turned into a mass of flames. 
Before the pilot was able to jump from his basket 
and save himself in his parachute, he was overcome 
by the gas and flames. Barney Faith went over af- 
terwards and found his aneroid barometer. 

Benney and I were talking before the fire in his 
room today (they don't cut up their wood as we do; 
instead, they lug a twenty foot beam into the room, 
place one end on the hearth and as it burns, shove it 
further in, Indian Fashion), and Gilmore was at- 
tempting to make hot chocolate from a cake which 
he couldn't shave down with a piece of eclat, when 
a knock came at the door. He yelled "Entrez" 
and, as the door slowly opened, we saw an old 
French couple standing on the threshold. This had 
been their home six months before, and now they 
had returned to look upon the wreckage. The 
woman wept when she saw the shell hole through 
the ceiling, the broken furniture which we were 



"AMBULANCE 464" 95 

burning on our fire and the heap of old family treas- 
ures lying in one corner. We said nothing, we 
couldn't say anything; but as they sadly departed, 
the man muttered, "It is not very nice but after 

the war we will " and we heard no more. 

Benney and I were silent and Gilmore forgot about 
his cocoa for a few minutes. It had never occurred 
to us before when we tore a house to pieces for fire- 
wood, and carted off all the books and ornaments for 
souvenirs, that people like these had actually lived 
in them or would ever return. War becomes a little 
sadder, a little more real now, after we have seen 
what the civilian population has suffered. Before, 
Dombasle was only a mass of ruined buildings. 
Now we see in it the destruction of hundreds of 
happy homes, and the scattering abroad of all the 
inhabitants. 

This week's American mail arrived today. I re- 
ceived four letters from the family, and one from 
Helen. She tells me the long promised socks have 
finally been finished. But instead of sending them 
in the usual manner, she is going to mail them in two 
separate packages, a week or ten days apart, so that 
(this is the brilliant idea) if one sock is lost at sea, 
she will have only one more to knit. 

One of the new ten inch railway guns passed 
through town today and fired about fifty practice 
shots up to the Boche trenches on Hill 304, about 



96 "AMBULANCE 464" 

seven miles distant. Bradley and I heard before 
that the affair was going to come off and got down to 
the tracks just as they began to fire. There were two 
cars in the outfit, one for the shells, and the other 
for the gun itself. Great jacks were propped un- 
der the south side of the car, presumably to keep it 
from being knocked over by the recoil. The shells, 
which happened to be "220's," were shoved from 
the other car up to the breech in a long trough. 
The brass powder casings were being carried by 
hand and pushed into the gun immediately after the 
projectile itself had been put in place. The men 
were working well and sending four or five shots 
a minute, which isn't bad for a gun of that caliber. 
One of the officers standing near told us if we got 
directly behind the gun and twenty or thirty feet 
away from it we would see the shell emerging from 
the mouth. We couldn't find it at all at first but 
after a few trials, we managed to locate it almost 
before we heard the explosion. It looked like a 
small black ball and appeared to be shooting di- 
rectly upwards; and if you strained your eyes you 
could see it for eight and sometimes even ten sec- 
onds. 



April 14th. Dombasle. 

The final orders have come. We will leave Dom- 
basle tomorrow morning and go to some town near 
Epernay where the Division will be "en repos." 
Those of us who were not on duty today had to wash 
our cars again and then load each machine with 
Ford parts, essence (gasoline) cans, and things like 
stoves and supplies which we carry from place to 
place. 

Old 464 has sunk way down on her springs with 
three twenty gallon cans of gasoline and a box of 
the Frenchmen's tools. 

I was on duty for the last time at Esnes yesterday. 
It was pretty quiet in the morning, when I was pok- 
ing about in the shell holes behind the chateau, 
hunting for time fuses. Lloyd and Harrison came 
out on Kann's car about eleven, on a camera hike. 
We had lunch with LeFevre in his abri. After- 
wards I asked M. Bouvier if he would take us up 
into the second line trenches, or at least to the top 
of Hill 304, but he was a trifle reluctant about it and 
finally went off somewhere by himself. Another 
chap, a brancardier named Foker whom I knew 
fairly well, had heard us talking and as soon 

97 



98 "AMBULANCE 464" 

as Bouvier left, offered to go up with us. We 
jumped at the chance and set out immediately. 
Fully exposed to the enemy, who were less than one 
mile away, we started up the hill, which commences 
a few rods behind the post. As we drew near the 
top we obtained a magnificent view of the whole sur- 
rounding country. Before us lay the summit of Hill 
304, whose clayish brown soil had been plowed up 
again and again during the three years the mighty 
struggles have been waged over it. To the east rose 
Mort Homme. Along its gentle sloping crest we 
could distinguish the first line German trenches, and 
thirty or forty yards below them, the French. 

Now and then a German shell exploded in the 
valley below, just to let us know the war was still 
going on. We had only gone a short distance be- 
yond this point when it became necessary to enter a 
boyau or communication trench. No Man's Land 
lay four hundred yards in front of us over the next 
slope and although we couldn't be seen here from a 
German outpost, we had to be very careful; for noth- 
ing lay between us and the Boche machine guns in 
the valley towards Mort Homme. Foker thought it 
better not to go in the open any longer since there 
were four of us together and it was a pretty clear 
day. Walking through the windings of the trench, 
we descended into the ravine which the French 
called the "Valley of Death." It got very muddy 




i. A mine crater after the explosion. It is more than two hundred feet long. Forty 
French soldiers were killed here. 

2. A supply station in a front line trench at La Harazee. Here are collected peri- 
scopes, hand and rifle grenades, corkscrew barbed-wire stakes, and rifles. A gas alarm 
gong hangs above the poilu on the left. 

3. Midsummer in the Argonne forest. 



"AMBULANCE 464" 99 

near the bottom, especially where sections of the 
trench had been caved in by shells. Finally, after we 
had sunk in up to our knees several times, Foker de- 
cided that we could take a chance on walking in the 
open again. A couple of shrapnel burst above us but 
it was such a short distance now to the second lines 
that we didn't bother about going back to the boyau 
again. We came to the "Poste de Secours" which 
we recognized some distance away by the Red Cross 
flag, stuck in a lump of clay outside the abri. We 
stopped for a few minutes to get warm and also 
to inquire if it would be possible to go to the 
first line trenches. One poilu volunteered to 
take us up, but the Doctor in charge told us 
it would be safer to make the trip at night. 
The trenches were in such bad shape from 
the last two attacks that one of us would very likely 
be potted by a German sniper in passing through a 
destroyed section. We were thankful for their 
kindness and I promised to return at nine that eve- 
ning, if there were no "grand couches" to take down 
to Ville. When we left the post a severe snow- 
storm was blowing which permitted us to make the 
entire trip back to the chateau in the open. No 
souvenir hunter could imagine anything more won- 
derful. The whole side of the hill was literally 
strewn with hand-grenades, unexploded German 
shells of every size, huge trench torpedoes, ready to 



ioo "AMBULANCE 464" 

be sent on their last journey, and bushels of eclat, 
compression bands and time fuses. I found a per- 
fect top of a German "150" (six inch) shell, loaded 
with shrapnel; but it was so heavy I had to drop it 
after a few hundred yards. I also picked up five 
Boche fusees, some pieces of compression band from 
a ten inch shell and the base of a torpedo. I put 
them in the side box of my car as soon as I got to 
the post again. Bouvier heard about our plans for 
returning in the evening a short time after we ar- 
rived and was so opposed to our going that we gave 
up the idea for the moment. Sammy Lloyd and 
Harrison started for Montzeville not long after- 
wards and I went back to Dombasle, where I now 
am, Bradley having relieved me at half-past eight. 
It will be hard, leaving our cantonment here to- 
morrow. For although we will be delighted to have 
a short rest in some quiet little village, nevertheless 
our work here has been very interesting and we do 
not look forward with much pleasure to the repos 
life of Longeville and Jubecourt. 



Ill 

IN THE ARGONNE FOREST 



Ill 

April i$th, 1917. Senard "En Repos" 

A great many things have happened since we left 
Dombasle, yesterday morning. Last night we stayed 
in a little place named Waly and then this morn- 
ing we went on through Triacourt to Senard where 
the Doctor told us we were to stay during repos. 
We naturally expected that we would remain here 
two or three weeks. So we unpacked all the cars 
and spent most of the morning making our sleeping 
quarters in the barn comfortable. Suddenly, when 
four of us were playing horse-shoes near our "Salle 
a Manger" the news came that we were to move in 
one hour, to join another division in a new sector. 
This was a shock to all of us for it meant not only 
leaving our friends the brancardiers of the G.B.D. 
(stretcher-bearer corps) but also M. Rolland, our 
Doctor, who had been so good to us, and all the 
poilus in the division with whom we had become 
acquainted during the two months we had been with 
them. Two of the Frenchmen are leaving the sec- 
tion today; Lieutenant Bayart, to go to America on 
some business with which he was connected before 

103 



io 4 "AMBULANCE 464" 

the war, and kind little Monsieur Phillipe who is 
to be transferred to another service. 

I am now writing this in the front seat of my car. 
We have said farewell to our friends and have 
formed the cars in convoy along the village street. 
The order to start will soon be given, and we will 
leave the old Hundred and Thirty-second forever. 
Iselin has whistled. I can write no more, for the 
fellows are cranking their cars, and Number One 
is already on its way. 



April i%th. Ste. Menehould. 

It is almost two weeks since we left our divi- 
sion at Senard. We are now attached to another, 
the Seventy-first, with our cantonment in Ste. Mene- 
hould. We evacuate two front line posts, La 
Harazee and St. Thomas, about fourteen miles north 
of here, and one relay which they call Suniat. 
There are always two cars at each post instead of 
one as we used to have at Esnes and Post Two. The 
hills afford wonderful protection for the roads. At 
La Harazee our cars are only four hundred yards 
from the Boche lines and at St. Thomas less than 
half a mile. As far as I can learn, there hasn't 
been much heavy fighting here for over a year and 
I am afraid we are in for six, or perhaps eight weeks 
of easy work. 

Craig and I were sent to La Harazee the second 
day after we arrived here. We started exploring the 
place as soon as we got out of our cars. The quarters 
which they had given us we found to be a very com- 
fortable abri, dug into the side of a steep hill, in 
Pueblo Indian fashion. Directly opposite our door- 
way stood the morgue and the Regiment refuse heap. 
We soon discovered the brancardiers' kitchen where 

105 



io6 



"AMBULANCE 464" 







See opposite page. 



"AMBULANCE 464" 107 

Explanation of Figures on Page 106 

1. French "citron" hand grenade. The cap, which has 
been removed, is screwed on to one end; before throwing 
the grenade, the cap is struck with the hand or knocked 
against some hard object. It explodes six or seven sec- 
onds later, and breaks up into as many pieces as there 
are squares. It is quite similar to the English " Mill's " 
grenade. 

2. French rifle grenade, which has become very popu- 
lar at the front. It is placed in a little funnel-shaped 
steel cylinder which fits over the barrel of a rifle; the bul- 
let passes through the center, explodes the cap projecting 
from the knob on the right, and flies off into the air. 
The grenade itself is propelled by the escaping gases, and, 
travelling anywhere from 50 to 200 or 300 yards, is ex- 
ploded a few seconds afterwards, by the time fuse ignited 
by the cap. 

3. The time fuse and head of a French "75" (3 inch) 
shell. The fuse is ignited by a cap and trigger within the 
fuse at the moment the shell leaves the gun. This ignites 
the powder, wrapped in a spiral coil running from the top 
of the fuse to the screw on the left. This burns until it 
comes to the hole punched at the second (time unit mark 
on the brass covering) at which the shell is to explode. 
Then the flame passes into the shell itself and explodes 
the "B. S. P." or high explosive powder by igniting the 
last big cap. 

4. A two pound French trench torpedo which is shot 
out of a small gun by means of compressed air and hurled 
a distance of 200 or 300 yards. It is exploded by the ful- 
minate of mercury cap, A, which in turn is set off by the 
trigger. The ring regulates the position of the latter and 
the spring keeps the cap and trigger separated. 



108 U AMBULANCE 464" 

we were to eat, and immediately made friends with 
the cook. Waiting around the post became very 
dull, and when the sergeant said that he didn't be- 
lieve we would have a run before noon, we got his 
permission to take a short walk in the trenches 
which begin about one hundred feet behind our quar- 
ters. In barely five minutes we came to the second 
lines. While we were standing here, wondering 
whether we ought to go any further alone, a poilu 
from a nearby machine post came up. By tactful 
words and many cigarettes we got him to go with 
us up to the first line. He took us two or three 
kilometres along the front, explaining everything as 
we went from one place to another. I had my first 
peek through a field periscope at some German 
trenches fifty yards away, and at a listening post, 
which the Boches only use at night, twenty yards dis- 
tant. We learned exactly how the communication 
trenches intertwine with the first, second and third 
lines, how there are grenade and observation posts 
a few yards apart, and where the deep abris are lo- 
cated in which thousands of cylinders of gas lie 
stored, ready at a moment's notice to be sent over to 
the German lines. Our guide told us the French had 
sent over a big attack last week and that the Boches 
would probably reply as soon as they got a favorable 
wind. While we were talking at this place a little 
toy balloon came sailing overhead, from the enemy's 



"AMBULANCE 464" 109 

lines, apparently to test the speed and velocity of the 
wind. When we returned to the post, we learned 
that it had brought over a number of German news- 
papers commenting upon the war and making vari- 
ous suggestions for peace. There were also several 
French papers, printed in the Ardennes, which is 
captured territory. I managed to get one of the lat- 
ter, and found to my surprise, that three whole pages 
were devoted to the names of French soldiers in the 
hands of the Germans. The name of each man, his 
military and his regiment number, were all given. 
But of course the whole journal had been very 
heavily censored by the enemy authorities. It was 
a poor attempt, however, to conceal their plans for 
a gas attack. After this he showed us places where 
there was a network of barbed-wire, above the 
trench to block the way in case of a German attack; 
and machine gun positions at the end of certain boy- 
aux which sweep the whole trench if necessary. We 
then learned how to throw hand grenades, how to 
send up star shells and to fire rifle grenades, and how 
necessary it was to talk quietly on account of the 
proximity of the enemy. Luckily I had my camera 
with me and I took picture after picture of the things 
we saw. When we were obliged to return to La 
Harazee, the guide gave us an automatic revolver, 
which he had taken from a German officer. We 



no "AMBULANCE 464" 

paid him twenty francs for it. It would very likely 
have sold for a hundred marks in Berlin. 

Two days later I went to La Harazee again. I 
had gone about half way when a poilu stopped me 
and asked for a ride. We are not supposed to carry 
any persons except wounded, but sometimes we take 
pity on a poor fellow and give him a lift. This 
particular man was returning to the front from his 
leave of absence; he had been walking all day and I 
thought it wouldn't hurt to carry him a few miles. 
He was a very interesting fellow and turned out to 
be connected with a still more interesting service. 
He was one of the operators of a new device for 
receiving the enemy's telephone messages by means 
of sound waves through the earth. They have a sort 
of wireless outfit stationed half a mile behind the 
first lines, and to this are connected several long 
copper wires which extend to the German "fil de 
fer" (barbed-wire) out in No Man's Land, which is 
about as close as they can get to the German tele- 
phone system without being detected. With this ap- 
paratus they are able to hear the Boche messages 
very distinctly. But he told me that both sides now 
send all of their important news by courier, for the 
Germans have recently discovered a similar device 
and they blockade each other's moves very success- 
fully. However, it was used for several months by 



"AMBULANCE 464" m 

the French and English before their friends across 
No Man's Land knew anything about it. 

I carried the biggest load I have ever had in the 
car when I came back to Ste. Menehould the next 
day. Besides five blesses including a captain, a 
couple of artillery men and a poor fellow with the 
measles, were Williams who had come along to 
show me a new post in the woods, the rifles, helmets 
and packs of every soldier and the officer's trunk, an 
empty pinard barrel and four ravitaillement boxes. 
It was not a simple task to load this into a little Ford 
ambulance and climb those long hard hills on the 
return journey. However the car stood up to her 
task like a real automobile and I am proud of her. 
As soon as I got to Ste. Menehould I took the Cap- 
tain to "1 — 71," as the big hospital in the main 
square of the city is called. Then I left three of 
those remaining at the H. O. E. near the railroad 
station; and had to lug Monsieur Measles five miles 
further on, to the contagious hospital at Verrieres. 



May 2nd. Quarters at Ste. Menehould. 

Gilmore and I have been printing pictures since 
dark; we have rigged up a temporary dark-room in 
our barn and do all our photographic work here. 
We use a candle behind some colored paper for a 
red light, and an old carbide auto lamp instead of a 
Mazda bulb for printing. Naturally, we have no 
running water but carry all that we use for two 
blocks in our radiator buckets. Of course we might 
send our films into Paris to be developed but then 
there is the chance of losing them in the mails or at 
the overworked "Kodaks" office. And especially 
since some of the photos are mighty valuable to us, 
we prefer to do them ourselves. 

After supper we had a regular rough and tumble 
circus out behind the "Salle a Manger!' Frazer and 
Ray Eaton were feeling happy after a bottle of 
pinard apiece and we were all in for a good time. 
Somehow or other Eaton got the idea that he was a 
young Hercules and for a good quarter of an hour 
stood with his head through the center rung of a 
ladder and tried to swing the thing around with a 
fellow on each end. Of course it was a strain on him 
and after three or four rounds he would fall to the 




i. The shelter of the little gun which shoots small trench torpedoes by means of 
compressed air. 

2. A gas attack this evening? This poilu is learning, by means of his weathervane 
and an instrument for recording the velocity of the wind, whether or not he can launch 
an attack. 

3. Gilmore in the steel turret of an observation post, twenty yards in front of the 
first lines. 




i. An American made ten ton truck, so camouflaged with cubist painting in green, 
brown and yellow that it is rendered invisible at half a mile. 

2. A gunboat on the Chalons-Prunay canal. It carries two five-inch cannon and a 
number of machine guns. 

3. A machine depot in Champagne, where 60,000 shells are stored; each pile is care- 
fully camouflaged with pine boughs. 



"AMBULANCE 464" 113 

ground exhausted. Then Frazer bet me a bottle of 
champagne that he could pull his foot up over his 
head before I could. I was somewhat soberer than 
he was, and managed to beat him to it. But he kept 
stubbornly at it and finally got his foot over and 
several inches further down his back than I had. The 
judges called the affair a draw. After this we tried 
climbing a ladder without support, crawling all the 
way around a table without touching the ground and 
jumping over a broomstick held by both hands. A 
large and interested crowd of townspeople and sol- 
diers collected to watch these queer, rough games 
in which we Americans seemed to delight. 

I spent thirteen cents this afternoon to have my 
hair clipped and get a shave. The latter was the 
first one in three months and took off a fairly re- 
spectable mustache. Then, to make the overhauling 
complete, I took an eighteen cent bath at the Hos- 
pital "Mixte," where all the Algerians and Moroc- 
cans go. This is really the first time I have seen a 
tub since I left the Espagne at Bordeaux almost 
four months ago. 

"Montzie" committed suicide this morning. He 
carelessly stepped into an open sewer near the can- 
tonment shortly after he had left the dining-room 
and that was the last time he was seen alive. It was 
rather an untimely ending after his hairbreadth es- 
capes on the Esnes road, and after his sleeping on 



ii4 "AMBULANCE 464" 

stretchers oozing blood in the old abri at Post Two. 
Montzeville, I wouldn't have thought it of you, you 
ugly little mongrel pup. 

The fine "Ecole des Garcons" here in Ste. Mene- 
hould has been requisitioned by the government for 
hospital purposes and school is being held just at 
present in a wooden shack behind our cantonment. 
Every morning at recess forty or fifty of the little 
fellows flock around our cars, playing marbles and 
spinning tops. One would think that they were 
girls, in their funny little black aprons. They seem 
rather fond of me for I have taken a number of pic- 
tures of them at play; then the other morning I 
threw down to them, from the loft in the barn, about 
fifty tiny American flags which father sent to me. 
There was one grand scramble for them and of 
course some went away with more than their share. 
Now I can hardly walk to the Epicerie without some 
little fellow asking me for a petit drapeau. And 
if I ask him what he did with the one he got in the 
scramble the day before, he says he tried to keep it, 
but his little sister cried for it so when he got home 
that he had to give it to her. . . . They are al- 
ways eager to talk. Several days ago one little 
chap came up to my car in which I was sitting, read- 
ing a letter from home, and asked me how old I ^as. 
He was rather surprised when I told him seventeen 
and couldn't understand why I had come over at 



"AMBULANCE 464" 115 

that age. He had a brother eighteen, who wasn't 
to join the army for three months yet. 

We aren't nearly so busy as we would like to be. 
Three days of the week we loaf around Ste. Mene- 
hould and then we are on duty for the next twenty- 
four hours at one of the posts. At times we work 
on our cars or hammer out souvenirs from Boche 
bullets and pieces of shell. A few of us are fond of 
quoits and play every day on a little island in the 
Aisne, across from our quarters. In the afternoon 
we drop around to the Patisserie near the Hotel de 
Ville, if we have any money, and get Marie, the 
attractive little waitress there, to bring us a tray of 
cream tarts and lemonade — occasionally we experi- 
ment on something stronger. But on Tuesdays and 
Wednesdays it is closed, as are all the Patisseries 
and candy shops in France ; we cannot even buy milk 
chocolate at an Epicerie, so we have to be content 
with our regular fare. 

The other evening, Bradley who comes from 
Berkley, California, and Tenney, the only fellow in 
the section who has a smaller moustache than my 
own, set out with me for a stroll in the moonlight 
when it was really time to be in bed. We talked 
of the war, of section life and many other things; 
and when an hour had passed we were still going on. 
We reached the summit of a high hill overlooking 
Ste. Menehould some three miles away, and sat 



n6 U AMBULANCE 464" 

down on a grassy bank, to rest and to watch the 
star shells breaking in the Champagne Sector. Just 
as we arose to begin our return journey the search- 
light on the hill in the city threw its great shaft of 
light into the sky and played it back and forth across 
the heavens. Then a shot from the anti-aircraft gun 
beside it broke the quiet of the night. We could not 
locate the enemy aeroplane for it never rested in one 
place. We were on top of a little knoll and could 
see very clearly the flash from the gun in Ste. Mene- 
hould, followed by the report twelve seconds later 
and then immediately after this, the bright glare 
from the exploding shrapnel a mile above us. They 
fired only a few shots, however, for they were unable 
to locate the plane on account of its great height. 
As we walked home the nightingales were singing. 
They make one forget about the war and think of 
France three years ago, when men instead of women 
were plowing in the fields, when Dombasle and 
Esnes and St. Thomas were happy villages, not dull 
piles of stone. The poilu too, dreams of those days 
and hopes and prays for the time when he can return 
to his family and again resume his normal life. 



May 7th. St. Thomas. 

This is my first time on duty here. I have been 
twice to La Harazee and once to Suniat. They call 
the place St. Thomas because of a little village of 
that name which used to be here. I guess it has 
been totally destroyed by German fire, for I have 
never seen anything of the houses. There is, how- 
ever, part of a wall standing near the post, which 
looks as though it might have belonged to a church. 
The post itself is one of the best we have ever 
had. It is an old gravel-pit in the side of a hill, and 
is very well protected on three sides. Next to us is 
the abri of a colonel of the two hundred and twenty- 
first regiment. It is a fine one, reinforced with ce- 
ment and has an attractive flower garden in front of 
it. The latter contains a lot of unexploded Boche 
shells, which have fallen nearby and which some gen- 
erous soul has brought to the colonel to use as bound- 
ary marks for his garden. Then not far from the 
spot where I left my car is a deep well of fine cool 
water. I mean to take a couple of gallons back to 
Ste. Menehould with me, for the water there comes 
from the Aisne and is very poor. 

After I got acquainted with the brancardiers who 

117 



n8 "AMBULANCE 464" 

seemed to be "midis" from the South of France, I 
set out on a walk in the trenches, and was gone about 
three hours. At one place in a first line trench I got 
a wonderful view of No Man's Land and the Boche 
trenches. In the background stood the ruins of 
Servon, through which their third line runs. 

A heavy "bombardment began as I was leaving and 
shell after shell whistled overhead, apparently going 
toward St. Thomas. Sad to say, it was all over 
before I arrived and a lot of new holes around the 
post and everybody sticking pretty close to his 
abri were the only signs that anything unusual had 
happened. While we were eating lunch a blesse 
came in who had lost the thumb and first finger of 
each hand half an hour before while attempting to 
unload a Boche grenade. He suffered terribly but 
never made a whimper during the long ride into 
Suniat. After I saw this fellow I thought of what 
one little grenade had done to him and wondered 
why it was we take chance after chance in unloading 
stuff, just for souvenirs. A couple of fingers missing 
or a scarred face makes a more lasting souvenir than 
an old shell, but one you wouldn't be so proud of. 

We had a lively time at supper tonight, in our 
abri next to the post. Instead of cooking their own 
food the lazy brancardiers get it all prepared from 
one of the big kitchen sections just a few hundred 
yards from here. One of the dishes was fried pota- 



"AMBULANCE 464" 119 

toes. There weren't enough forks to go round, so 
we ate them with our fingers. One old fellow from 
Toulouse who told me afterwards that he was forty- 
eight years old, bragged that he hadn't tasted a drop 
of water for ten years. They joked all during the 
meal about their wine and told me I'd never be a 
real poilu (the word really means "hairy one") if I 
didn't drink pinard. So finally I let them pour me 
out a glass and we gave a toast to the speedy ending 
of the war. 



May 15th, 19 1 7. Hotel Continental, Paris. 

This heading certainly must look funny in my 
diary. The last entry was written while eating 
lunch with a crowd of brancardiers about a half a 
mile from the German lines and this one, in an ac- 
tually civilized room at the Hotel Continental. It 
happened that my permission fell due the day after 
I came back from St. Thomas and I left the Section 
at Ste. Menehould to spend eight happy days in 
Paris. It was a long hot ride into Paris and we had 
to stand up all the way. But it was wonderful to get 
there and even more wonderful to take a hot bath at 
the hotel and then sleep between a real pair of linen 
sheets for fourteen hours. 

Paris is happier than when we left. There are 
no coal worries now and the markets are overflow- 
ing with fresh spring vegetables and fruits. Our 
entry into the war seems to have cheered the people 
immensely. Everywhere you go there are Ameri- 
can flags hanging from the windows. They think 
about it so much and talk about it so much that one 
would suppose we had a million men over here al- 
ready. 

I have had a wonderful time ever since I arrived. 

120 



"AMBULANCE 464" 121 

For when I am not playing tennis with some most 
attractive English girls at their country club on an 
island in the Seine, I am chasing out to Versailles for 
an afternoon or promenading with some friend in 
the "Bois de Boulogne." Every evening Anderson 
and I get together and, starting out with a marvel- 
lous meal at Foyots or Drouants, we end up with the 
opera and a cafe afterwards. The authorities are 
very strict about meats, sugar and certain vegetables 
in the restaurants ; but you can't go hungry if you are 
willing to pay the price. 

The field service is growing very rapidly and has 
taken over an annex in Rue Le Kain. Instead of 
receiving fifteen or twenty new men each week as 
they were doing when we came last February they 
are getting one hundred now. Since it is impossible 
to send them all out in Ambulance Sections, Andrew 
and Galatti have organized a group of truck sections 
which will handle ammunition and supplies behind 
the lines. It won't be quite as exciting as our work 
but it will be very interesting and certainly very help- 
ful to the French army. 

Andy and I went to the Gaumont Palace in Clichy 
tonight. They had advertised a big movie called 
"L' Invasion des Etats Unis." We thought we were 
going to see a remarkable picture, but it turned out 
to be the old "Battle Cry of Peace," which I had 
seen in New York two years before. The French 



122 "AMBULANCE 464" 

audience, however, thought it quite wonderful and 
applauded continually throughout the show. They 
understand, far better than we do in America, its 
real meaning. Andy had to leave early and since the 
Metro had stopped I walked back to Rue Raynouard 
afterwards. It was long after midnight when I got 
there. The door was locked at Twenty-one, so I 
had to climb over the wall. Two other permission- 
aires who had been down in the Latin Quarter came 
up while I was struggling to get in and the three of 
us managed to get over together. 

I will probably go back to the Section tomorrow 
with Williams and Allen. We are to get our "Or- 
dre de Movement" from the office of the Army 
Automobile Service, next to the Gobelin tapestry 
works, in the morning and leave from the Gare de 
I'Est at noon. 



May 22. Ste. Menehould again. 

There was a big package from home awaiting me 
at the bureau on my return from Paris. I found a 
wonderful lot of eatables inside when I opened it. 
A few of the contents I could have bought in France 
but the maple sugar, grape-nuts and peanut butter 
were purely American. The sugar was delicious and 
enjoyed by everyone in the Section. Even the rats 
got their share. Last evening I put a lump at the 
head of my bed and Gilmore says he was awakened 
several times during the night by their clamor as 
they played on top of me. But I wasn't disturbed by 
them at all. I was sound asleep, dreaming of the 
good times I'd had in Paris. I had a lot of fun, too, 
with the Frenchmen over the peanut butter. I told 
them that it was American mustard, very expensive 
and much superior to their own, and let one of them 
try a little on a piece of bread. He threw it away in 
disgust after one bite and said we could eat it if we 
liked, but that it tasted rotten and he would stick to 
the French variety. They couldn't make out the 
grape-nuts either and seemed to think it was made 
from the crumbs of some hard material like their 
Army bread. 

123 



i2 4 "AMBULANCE 464" 

Benney had a remarkable escape one day last 
week, while I was away. He was driving one of 
Mrs. Harry Payne Whitney's cars, Number 78, 
through Vienne la Ville, on his way home from St. 
Thomas when a Boche shell exploded ten feet from 
him. Luckily it was at the rear of his car or he 
would have been killed instantly. As it was, his 
klaxon was torn off and the whole back of the Ambu- 
lance was filled with eclat. 

Eaton has finally come back from the hospital at 
Ville sur Couzances. That little scalding at Dom- 
basle last March laid him up for two long months. 
He tells lots of funny stories about his treatment 
there and claims to be the champion endurance 
wearer of winter flannels of the American Ambu- 
lance. He wore the same pair of woolen under- 
wear for three months. 

Payne came in from La Harazee this noon, 
grouchy as old Scrooge himself. And it was not 
until the happy-go-lucky Frazer ambled into our 
apartments an hour later with a broad grin on his 
face that we learned what was troubling Payne. It 
seems that the two had been at La Harazee to- 
gether and Frazer started out for town with two 
malades and one couche when the relief man came 
at ten-thirty. He had a close shave at Vienne la 
Ville where, as usual, the Boches were shelling the 
main street of the village. He would have gone 



"AMBULANCE 464" 125 

through at top speed if he had not noticed a poor 
beggar, with a bad cut in the arm, lying in the gut- 
ter. Of course he stopped to pick him up. While he 
was trying to lug the fellow over to his ambulance 
several more shells landed in the road in front of 
him and Frazer hardly knew whether he ought to 
run off and leave the man there or not. Just then 
a cloud of dust appeared in the distance which 
turned out to be Payne, trying to imitate 
Dario Resta. Frazer yelled at him when he got 
closer, to stop and help him with the blesse. . . . 
But Payne didn't notice him at all. He was too busy 
trying to keep the car on the road. Frazer had to 
get along as well as he could by himself and it took 
him five or six minutes to get his case arranged on a 
stretcher and loaded into the car. The Boches were 
still shelling the place when he left but he managed 
to get his load out safely. He found Payne waiting 
for him on the top of the next hill. And when 
Frazer asked him why the devil he hadn't stopped to 
help him down in the village, the other replied that 
he thought it would make such a wonderful picture 
with Frazer loading in wounded, with shells breaking 
on all sides, that he had just gone on about half a 
mile further, and then turned around and photo- 
graphed it. I presume Payne is peeved because he 
did such a crazy childish trick. He certainly ought 
to be. 



126 "AMBULANCE 464" 

Almost every day a Boche aviator flies overhead. 
This morning one dropped seven bombs in the town 
but fortunately no one was killed. Two fell very 
near the cantonment, and as we were awakened by 
the explosions, we heard little pieces of eclat come 
pattering down on the roof. A soldier in one of 
the neighboring houses had his pillow torn away and 
the wall above him pierced in fifty places by steel 
splinters. He received only a couple of scratches, 
however. Everyone, especially the little fellows in 
the school, delight in watching such a fight. They 
clap and shout "tres bien" if a shell bursts near the 
enemy's plane and if it finally escapes they console 
themselves with "Just wait, we will get him the next 
time." 

Lundquist and I visited the aviation field today, 
hoping to get a short trip in an observation plane. 
The officers were very polite and told us everything 
about the machines but couldn't allow us to go up 
on account of orders, which they apologized for not 
being able to break. 

I spent several hours this afternoon grinding 
down 464's valves and scraping out the carbon from 
the cylinders. It was a dirty job and a rather long 
one but well worth the effort. Now she runs fifty 
per cent better, and when I gave her a trial run 
afterwards, she took the worst hills around here on 
high. 



"AMBULANCE 464" 127 

Sammy Lloyd told me tonight about the three 
American girls who were here while I was away on 
leave. They had been connected with a clearing 
house in Paris, and wanting to see a little of the front 
before they returned to the States, they got papers 
from some high official allowing them to take a three 
days' tour along the front, and started out for the 
war zone. They came to Ste. Menehould on the 
second day, and one of the fellows offered to drive 
them out to one of our posts. They went to St. 
Thomas, had a peek at the trenches and No Man's 
Land and rushed back to the city again. Possibly, 
they intend to lecture at home on conditions in 
France and life in the trenches! 



May 2$th. Suniat Relay-Post. 

Suniat is a queer place, sort of a hospital and yet 
for most cases, merely a relay post. Tom Orr and 
I have been on duty here since yesterday at noon. 
We had one run apiece during the night with some 
blesses from a little "coup de main." This is a very 
small attack where a patrol of fifteen or twenty men 
are sent over to the enemy's lines to bring back pris- 
oners. Later these men are questioned and much 
information, such as the movement of troops and the 
location of machine-guns is obtained. 

It is a beautiful Spring day here. The trees are 
covered with leaves once more and the fields seem 
brighter than they were two weeks ago. I was talk- 
ing to the "Medecin Major" this morning, bragging 
about the huge apple-trees we grow in America. I 
carelessly used the expression "Pomme de terre" for 
the word apple, and he laughingly told me that there 
weren't any potato trees in France. Several of the 
officers here have asked me if I knew of any attrac- 
tive American girls who would be willing to corre- 
spond with them. This seems to be an old custom 
among the French soldiers, and a very good one. 

128 



"AMBULANCE 464" 129 

For a cheerful letter from their marraine, as they 
call her, is a great treat to these men. 

Two days ago, when I was at La Harazee, I vis- 
ited the trenches at night and spent several hours in 
the first lines, I had promised Amulot, who be- 
longs to the "Sappers" and lives in an abri near ours, 
that I would go to his mine the next time I was on 
duty here and take some flashlights of him working 
underground. He called for me at eight o'clock and 
from then on I had a most interesting evening. We 
took the same communication trench to the first lines 
which I had used before and then walked some dis- 
tance along this before we came to the entrance of 
the mine. Here he said a few words to the guard. 
After this we went down a long series of steps, until 
we were fully thirty feet underground. It was very 
cold and damp and water trickled down in little 
streams from the ceiling. Then he took me through 
a long passage in the direction of the Boche trenches, 
and finally stopped in a little room which seemed to 
be the end of the tunnel. By the light of the pigeon 
lamp which he held in his hand I could see two 
poilus, one piling up powder in a great stack in a 
corner and the other who had a pair of microphone 
receivers on his head, listening to something very 
intently. Amulot whispered to me that the Boche 
trenches were only twenty feet above us here and 
that one of their counter mines was just ten feet 



130 "AMBULANCE 464" 

away. The man with the phones, he told me, was 
trying to learn what the Germans were doing across 
the way; he could hear them digging and even talk- 
ing, with his apparatus. If they continued to work 
there much longer the French would soon set off 
their mine and blow up every Hun within a hundred 
yards. I got a photo of them at work, with a sack of 
earth for a support for my camera, and my gas- 
mask held in one hand above my head as a tray for 
the flashlight powder. It was pitch-black when we 
emerged into the open again. In front of us a 
couple of Frenchmen were repairing barbed-wire out 
in No Man's Land and to the left a hand-grenade 
duel was in progress. I thought it was time to get 
back to the post but Amulot said no. He was picture- 
crazy and had to take me to two other mines, and 
also to a place where they had a new trench gun 
which shoots funny little torpedoes by compressed 
air. This took up fully an hour more and when I 
again remarked that I had better be leaving, he said 
that he wanted me to hear a Boche machine gun first. 
And what did he do but dash out into No Man's 
Land and pound on some stones with a pick so that 
the enemy would hear him. Luckily no star shell 
went up very close to him while he was out, or he 
would surely have been potted. I heard the machine 
gun very distinctly, however. I think he had had 
more pinard for supper than was good for him. It 




i. An admiring group of officers gathered around Guynemer, the peer of all aviators 
who was killed September, 1917, just after downing his 53rd adversary. 

2. An American tractor, used for hauling big guns, being carried to the front. 

3. A German aeroplane bomb, exploding in front of a French aerodrome. 



"AMBULANCE 464" 131 

was long after midnight when I got back to La 
Harazee. To my surprise I found Haven had been 
sent to Suniat with three couches, and not ten minutes 
later they brought down a load for me. I thanked 
my stars that it had not come while I was out with 
Amulot. On the way down I learned that the 
blesses I was carrying had been wounded in an out- 
post near the mine in which I took the last picture 
and at the very time we were down in it. 

There is great rivalry in the section to see who 
can do the most exciting thing in the trenches at 
La Harazee. Several days ago I hung around an 
observation post about fifty yards from the enemy's 
lines until I finally got a glimpse of the steel plate 
of a Boche post and apparently the eye of a sniper 
behind it. It disappeared after a while and a min- 
ute later I saw the smoke from his cigarette floating 
upwards some distance further down the trench. 
. . . Then on Saturday, when Ott Kann and Har- 
rison were there, they yelled over to a Boche and 
had a short conversation with him and ended with 
the heads of both sides above the trench. . . . Gil- 
more and Payne thought they would go them one 
better, and the next time actually go over with a lot 
of bread and chocolate; of course they intended to 
make arrangements beforehand to meet him half- 
way; and since they both speak German this would 
not be hard. The idea may seem absurd but it has 



132 "AMBULANCE 464" 

been done a good many times by the French and 
they thought they could work it too. However, I 
am afraid they can't for if they told the officers they 
would be stopped, and if they should go without 
their knowing it, they might be brought up as spies 
when it was found out. 

Hang it all! It's ten o'clock, and all the lights 
have gone out. 



IV 

"EN REPOS," AND IN CHAMPAGNE 



IV 

June 5th, 19 17. Les Grandes Loges. 

On the first day of June we departed from Ste. 
Menehould for good and all. Section Thirteen 
which last month was worked to death in Cham- 
pagne, has taken our place. We are delighted to be 
able to try our luck at some real action once more. 
The little town where we are now staying, Les 
Grandes Loges, lies on the main road between Cha- 
lons and Reims. We shall probably remain here for 
a week "en repos" and then go up to the front for 
three or four weeks of heavy action. As usual in the 
smaller towns our quarters are in a barn and our 
cars are parked in the courtyard; there is a high 
hill behind the village, and every day we go to the 
summit to watch the artillery duels around Mont 
Cornillet and Moronvilliers, eight miles away. Last 
evening we saw a German gas attack roll over the 
French lines; great clouds of a creamy, yellowish 
vapor, stretching along the lines for a mile or more, 
were carried forward by the wind and poured into 
every nook and cranny of our trenches. In the 
midst of this a great puff of black smoke arose from 

135 



136 "AMBULANCE 464" 

the hill and a minute later we heard the report. It 
came either from a mine, or a "420," which the 
Boches occasionally send over. After we had crawled 
into bed in the barn, a German aviator shot down 
out of the sky and played his machine gun up and 
down the village street. He couldn't have been 
more than four hundred feet high for we heard the 
"rack-a-tack" of his machine gun as plainly as if it 
had been in the court behind the barn. This was 
a new trick to us, but the old lady who lives next 
door says they have been doing it all Spring. She 
tells me she is eighty years old, but every day I see 
her working in her garden. She is very cheerful 
and seems to like the work, but she is shy, and hates 
to have people watch her. The other morning I 
wanted to take her picture and it took ten minutes 
of careful persuasion to get her consent. 

Today we walked to the canal four miles south 
of the village and went in swimming. There were 
a couple of gun boats waiting here, to be sent up 
towards Prunay; and it gave one a queer feeling, 
emerging from a dive, to have this awkward steel 
monitor looking him in the face. 



June loth. Recy {near Chdlons-sur-Marne) 

Recy is the deadest little town in the Department 
of the Marne. They are therefore punishing the 
two-twenty-first, and consequently us at the same 
time, by billeting us here for the repos. I am afraid 
that we are going to have a mighty dull month, loaf- 
ing around the cantonment and taking a malade run 
once a week. 

Sometimes there is a little more than this, how- 
ever. We were all moping around the cantonment 
yesterday, when Decupert, the lieutenant's clerk, 
came in and said orders had just come from Bouy, a 
place ten miles north of here, to send out fifteen am- 
bulances at once; the Boches were shelling the town, 
and we had to evacuate the hospital. There was 
a mad stampede to the cars, and in five minutes fif- 
teen little Fords were racing wildly over the hills 
towards Bouy. The bombardment was over when 
we arrived. The Boches appeared to have been 
testing a new long-range gun, and dropped about 
forty of the big shells into the town from a battery 
fourteen miles away; but no great damage was done. 
One shell which dropped in the courtyard of the hos- 
pital, made a crater twenty feet across, but never 

137 



138 "AMBULANCE 464" 

even scratched the buildings on all four sides. The 
eclat appeared to have been shot high in air, and 
fallen harmlessly to the ground some distance away. 
Bouy is certainly a poor place for a hospital. Be- 
sides the big aviation field, it contains a good sized 
munition depot, and since it is liable to continual 
bombardment the authorities decided to evacuate all 
their patients to St. Hilare, even though the shelling 
was over. We worked at this for several hours, 
along with a French section. We formed in a long 
line at the H.O.E. in St. Hilare, waiting for the 
bulky French ambulances, which had arrived before 
us, to discharge their blesses. It was a very hot day 
and the air inside the ambulances was stifling. I gave 
my two Algerians a sip of water from my canteen, 
and they were so delighted with it, that I carried 
it down the line. Finally I came to a couple of 
wounded Boches, who couldn't resist the temptation 
of "Ein trinken Wasser," although at first they 
thought it was poisoned. The average German pris- 
oner I have seen so far has been an ill-fed, stupid- 
looking, roundheaded specimen who looked mighty 
sick of the war. But these fellows, although rather 
thin, had bright, intelligent faces. One was nine- 
teen, another twenty, and the third a little fellow 
who claimed to be twenty-four. I had a long talk 
with them, while we were waiting, although my own 
German was pretty well mixed with French words 



"AMBULANCE 464" 139 

which slipped in unconsciously. They told me they 
had been shoved into the trenches, near Moronvil- 
liers three days before, along with thousands of 
other troops in an attempt to check a big French at- 
tack, and had been captured when we advanced. 
When I asked them what they thought of the Kaiser 
one shrugged his shoulders but the youngest boy 
said that Wilhelm was all right and claimed that 
he was really a peaceful soul. He added that the 
militaristic ministry was the source of most of their 
troubles. Concerning the cause of the war, they had 
the peculiar idea that Russia had unexpectedly at- 
tacked them in 19 14, and they had been forced to re- 
sist. When I questioned them about food, they said 
they had been getting plenty of meat all spring, but 
that they had very little bread and scarcely any pota- 
toes. The attacking divisions get better food than 
any other. They told me our entry into the war was 
a great shock to the German people, and they could 
see no reason for our doing so. With the Allies 
backed by our strength now, they didn't think they 
would win the war, but supposed it would soon end 
in a draw. They are sure they won't be forced to 
accept our terms, however. I got a few buttons, 
from them before I left* as souvenirs. 

There were two German aviators next to these 
Algerians who had been brought down by Guynemer 
from about twelve thousand feet. Their machine 



Ho "AMBULANCE 464" 

had turned over again and again in their fall but 
they managed to catch themselves a few hundred 
feet from the ground. Of course they landed with 
terrific force anyway; but luckily right side up, and 
now, although their skin has turned blue from the 
fall, and though the shock itself almost killed them, 
they will live. 



June \$th f 19 1 7. Recy. 

This continued repos stuff is absolutely degrading. 
We won't be good for anything after the war. 
We do nothing except loaf, loaf, loaf all day long 
and perhaps once a week go to Vadenay or St. 
Hilare, for a few malade calls. Just for fun I have 
written an outline of all I did today, dividing it up 
according to hours. Here it is : 

7 130 — Breakfast gong, an old shell case, sounds 
and we pile out of our cars to the "salle a manger" 
for oatmeal and prune confiture. 

8 :oo — All is well. Breakfast is now over and 
the poker crowd have started the day's game. The 
bridge fiends are playing behind Tenney's car and 
two fellows are shooting craps. Gilmore and I are 
matching pennies and Stanley is trying to feed a raw 
egg to our new mascot, a young red fox. 

9 :oo — It is getting warmer. I have gone to my 
car and started a letter home. 

9:15 — It is much too hot to write. I have given 
up my letter for a book in French on artillery. 

9 130 — Artillery is dull, especially in French. I 
am now reading one of Ring Lardner's latest in the 
Saturday Evening Post. 

141 



142 "AMBULANCE 464" 

10:30 — It got so hot that I fell asleep on the 
last page of the story. Reading is too strenuous for 
me today. 

1 1 :oo — I loafed, fooled around and monkeyed 
for half an hour. I spent part of this time in 
planning how to waste away the afternoon. 

12:00 — I took a picture a few minutes ago while 
sitting in my car. I could have gotten it much 
better if I had moved but it was too much trouble. 

1 :oo — By dint of great effort Ott Kann and I 
covered the entire two hundred yards between the 
cantonment and the canal in a little less than twenty 
minutes and gazed upon the barges which are being 
towed along by man and woman power. Work like 
that would kill us (or do us a whole lot of good). 

1 :30 — Mosquitoes and bugs pestered us too much 
by the water so we sauntered rapidly back to the 
quarters and watched the poker game for a while. 
They are out for an endurance record today, trying 
to beat the one of fourteen hours and eight minutes 
made at Ste. Menehould, when they played until 
Bob, the old waiter, brought in the "Quaker Oats" 
at breakfast. 

3 130 — I fell asleep about two o'clock while I was 
attempting to decide whether I would finish my 
letter home or start a new story. 

4:30 — When climbing out of my car I noticed 
that one of my tires was flat. I think I shall pump 



"AMBULANCE 464" 143 

it tomorrow. Number One spark-plug is also on 
the blink, but there is no use changing it until I 
have to go out sometime in a hurry. 

This is what we do every day. No one has any 
pep. I think I'll go crazy, if we don't get out of 
this soon. 



June 17 th. Recy. 

Section Twelve is fast becoming the most re- 
ligious of all the American sections at the front. It 
has its Sunday morning service in English with a 
Protestant minister from the French army in 
charge. A week ago Saturday one of the work- 
men in the artillery repair shop near by, dropped 
around to the cantonment and suggested our hav- 
ing a service every Sunday. He had been preach- 
ing in England for some time when the war broke 
out and when he found he couldn't get in the army 
as a chaplain he enlisted in the artillery. For sev- 
eral Sundays now we have been gathering together 
in the "Salle a Manger" tent and with the aid of a 
hymn book and a Bible which I brought along we 
have gotten on splendidly. He preaches well, is 
very sincere, and makes really very few grammatical 
errors. 

Sammy and I are trying to find a way to get to 
Reims before we go up to the front again. It is 
only twenty-five miles, but we don't seem to be able 
to work it. We wouldn't be allowed to take a 
car that far and since dawn to dusk is our limit for 
hikes during our days off duty, it. is hardly possible 
in this time to walk fifty miles, and see the city 
itself. Moreover, the Boches have been punishing 

144 





rim- 




i. Getting the village children ready for a photograph. The little fellow in the 
center is holding the pup "Montzeville," our section mascot. 

2. Both eyes out and both arms torn to pieces by shells plinters. 

3. A. Piatt Andrew, director of the Field Service and Major Church, U. S. A., visiting 
our section in Champagne. 




*J <u 



"AMBULANCE 464" 145 

it severely lately. Yesterday they dropped in two 
thousand five hundred shells and the day before an 
even two thousand. This wouldn't keep us away, 
however, if we could find the means of quick trans- 
portation. 



June 19. Vadenay. 

I am on duty here for the second time. We are 
supposed to spend our twenty-four hours carrying 
malades suffering from indigestion and earache to 
the H. O. E. at St. Hilare. But luckily for us there 
are not many such cases and we spend most of our 
time in the village. We are the first Americans 
that have ever been in the place, at least since the 
war began. The woman at the Epicerie almost 
embraced me this morning when I called to buy a 
pound of figs; and then she wanted to know if I 
didn't think the war would end right away, with us 
in it. She was actually so glad to see me that she 
put an orange in with the figs as a present. 

There is a saucisse just behind the town and we 
watch it by the hour. It is attached to the ground 
by a thin wire cable which is reeled in and out at 
will upon a big steel drum. This is operated from 
an auto truck, designed especially for this purpose. 
And whenever the pilot thinks an enemy aviator is 
coming after him, he signals to those below; and 
they bring him in at a terrific rate. Sometimes he 
comes down so fast he appears to be falling. The 
pilot whom we saw killed near Dombasle last March 

146 



"AMBULANCE 464" 147 

would not have lost his balloon and incidentally his 
life if they had started to bring him down at full 
speed before the Boche was upon him. 

I thought, as I lay on my stretcher last night and 
the dull echoes of the distant "tir de barrage" in the 
Mont Cornillet Sector were gradually putting me to 
sleep, "would one year from today see France in 
civilian clothes again; and when twelve months had 
passed would No Man's Land be under cultivation 
once more?" I wonder if it will. 



June 25th. Still at Recy. 

The brancardiers think that we are soon going 
to move to Suippes or some place near there. If 
this rumor is true it will mean a lot of hard work 
for us. I am afraid, however, it won't last very 
long for me personally. For my time expires on 
the eighth of July and I will very likely leave the 
section then. I am expecting a cable from home, 
telling me whether or not I can enter Aviation or go 
down to Salonika in the Ambulance Service there. 
If the family disapproves of both of these things, I 
presume that I shall have to go home. 

There is a little mouse who lives in the wall of 
our dining-room whom we have nick-named Napo- 
leon Xenophon. He is a master of strategy and the 
combined efforts of the entire section have not yet 
resulted in his capture. Harrison and Tenney 
formulated the brilliant scheme yesterday of placing 
a string noose over the mouth of his home; and 
patiently waiting, one on either side, until the villain 
should emerge, they intended to jerk the cord and 
crush in his neck from the terrific pressure. But 
although they stayed there for several hours and got 
him to come out quite frequently by using bread for 

148 



"AMBULANCE 464" H9 

bait (something an American mouse would turn up 
his nose at) the clever little animal never waited 
long enough in the noose for them to pull it shut. 
Several times it seized the bread and returned to its 
hole before they could jerk the string. And at last, 
when they were really developing some speed with 
their trap, the mouse appeared at a side entrance to 
his home and laughed at them. 

The 22 1st had a big entertainment last evening 
in the town hall. The big event of the evening was 
a boxing match between a French middleweight and 
Kid Crowhurst of the American Ambulance. They 
fought on a tiny platform not more than ten feet 
square, and our veteran mechanic almost broke up 
the performance when a clean right hook from his 
mighty arm sent his opponent sprawling onto a chair 
off stage, on which lay the violin of the musician who 
came next on the program. The instrument was 
ruined; and although the audience didn't object at 
all, the fight was stopped in the next round. 

Mike O'Connor, one of the new men, and I 
walked into Chalons the other morning. He 
stopped at the Hospital "Militaire" to consult a 
doctor about something. While I was waiting for 
him outside I got into conversation with one of the 
patients, a young fellow not over eighteen, who I 
learned was a second lieutenant in the Artillery. He 
had studied at Fontainebleau and had been wounded 



150 "AMBULANCE 464" 

about two weeks ago, during the big offensive near 
Auberive and Moronvilliers. He spoke English well 
and told me all about himself and his family. He 
lives on the Rue Boissiere in Paris, only a short dis- 
tance from Rue Raynouard. His captain told him 
before he left that he would be cited, so that he will 
very likely get his "Croix de Guerre" I had to 
leave him when O'Connor came out; but I promised 
to call again and also to look him up in Paris, since 
there is a chance that he may be home on furlough 
when I come in the eighth of July. 

Tenney, Harrison and Sinclair left the Section 
today. They are going to join Section Ten now in 
Albania. 



June 27th, 19 17. Recy, yet. 

Sammy Lloyd and I hiked about twenty miles 
yesterday. We rode with Craig as far as Bouy and 
then went a-foot towards Mourmelon le Petit where 
Section Fourteen is quartered. (Sammy came over 
on the Chicago with a number of their men.) We 
walked along an old Roman road for a while and 
passed the monument commemorating the defeat of 
Attila and the Huns. It seemed rather a coinci- 
dence that sixteen hundred years later the same Huns 
are being again defeated within a few miles of the 
spot. We arrived at Mourmelon at three o'clock and 
the fellows there were kind enough to take us out to 
their posts, when they changed shifts two hours later. 
They go through Prosnes which is a badly wrecked 
place, and they have two little stations called Con- 
stantine and Moscow at the foot of Mont Cornillet 
and Mont Haut. They have had some hot times 
here. Even today the last part of the road had a 
number of fresh shell holes. Near their abri I 
photographed some dead Boches which the French 
have not had time to bury yet. The odor there was 
frightful. One of the fellows who had been on duty 
said that a German shell had fallen among the bod- 

151 



152 "AMBULANCE 464" 

ies during the night and mangled them more than 
ever. He also told us of the new use which the 
Germans have for their dead. Instead of burying 
them, a process which is expensive and certainly 
very inefficient, they collect several thousand bodies, 
load them onto freight cars and take them to a 
factory some distance behind the lines. Here they 
are put into a big machine like a sausage grinder 
and when the residue has been chemically treated 
they are able to extract a considerable amount of 
glycerine from it. This of course is very valuable 
to them in the manufacture of high explosives. The 
dead men are all supposed to be very patriotic and 
probably nothing pleases them more than to look 
down (or up, I don't know which) from their new 
homes and see that they have helped the Fatherland 
to the end. We were not able to stay here very long; 
we had to go back on the car returning to Mourme- 
lon. And after eating supper with their section there, 
we set out on our long journey to Recy. Sammy 
took with him a German machine gun belt containing 
five hundred bullets which one of Fourteen's men 
sold him. We couldn't walk very fast with it and 
didn't get home until midnight. 

About ten of us rode up to the Russian Hos- 
pital near Mourmelon le Grand this morning to at- 
tend the funeral of Paul Osborne, the Section 
Twenty-eight man who was killed near Prosnes a 



"AMBULANCE 464" 153 

few days ago. A protestant Army chaplain, the 
only one' I have seen in France, paid the last tribute 
over his body. They buried him with military hon- 
ors. Old Glory was draped over the coffin, and his 
coat with the Croix de Guerre which they had given 
him, was placed upon it. We marched away before 
the body was lowered into the grave, as is the cus- 
tom at such funerals. 



June 30, 19 17. Ferine de Piemont. 

We packed up our belongings this morning, threw 
the heavy stuff into the White truck and the G. M. 
C, and the rest in the ambulances, and bade Recy 
a joyful farewell. One o'clock found the whole 
convoy in our new cantonment at Ferme de Piemont, 
three miles south of Suippes. We are relieving 
Section Eight. They have been here seven weeks 
and gone through some very interesting work but no 
real big attacks. Tomorrow we take over their 
posts and they go back to Dommartin or Chalons 
with their division. There are four front line posts, 
Pont Suippes, Jonchery, Bois Carre and Ferme de 
Wacques, and a relay at both Suippes and Cuperly. 
Besides this, three cars are always on call at the 
cantonment. This means ten fellows a day for the 
work and consequently twenty-four hours on duty 
and twenty hours off, for every man. 

From the woods behind the quarters we can see 
Mont Cornillet, Mont Haut and the ridge above 
Moronvilliers, a few miles northwest of us. Our 
division will not be on the hill at all but will occupy 

154 



"AMBULANCE 464" 155 

the trenches from Auberive, at its foot, to a point 
near Souain and Ferme de Navarin. This means 
eight thousand troops holding a front of less than 
two miles. 



July 1st. Abri at Ferme de Wacques. 

Once more at a post, once again waiting for 
blesses with old 464. I arrived at seven this morn- 
ing, relieved the Section Eight man who was here 
and as soon as he had gone I chased over to the bran- 
cardiers' abri for a bite to eat. But alas, their sup- 
plies had been delayed somewhere on the road and 
they didn't expect them before night. This wasn't a 
very bright outlook for the day, with nothing to eat 
until suppertime. Luckily I had a loaf of bread in 
the side-box of my car and by breaking it into small 
pieces and calling each one by a different name such 
as creamed potatoes, waffles, salad and bisque ice- 
cream, I had two very enjoyable meals on the front 
seat of my ambulance. 

The general of the Seventy-first Division came 
here in his staff car very early this morning, for a 
promenade in the trenches. I talked with his chauf- 
feur for a few minutes and learned that he does this 
every day, in order to keep in touch with his men. 
Later on, since there was not a sign of a blesse, I 
strolled off towards the "premieres Ugnes" But I 
stumbled across a battery of "75's" before I had 
gone very far and found a young "aspirant" 

156 




i. Reserve soldiers, forty to fifty years old, arranging and taking inventory of a 
pile of 12 inch shells. 

2. The two huskiest workmen in the crowd lifting one of the 450 lb. shells. 

3. An artilleryman putting a time shell into the breech of an anti-aircraft "75," 
which, although mounted on an automobile, fires twenty-eight shots a minute. 




i. The famous hanging clock in the ruined church at St. Hilare le Grand. 

2. The fallen bells and the praying angels in the church at Suippes. The whole 
steeple has been shot away. 

3. One hundred poilu graves, each marked with a little tri-color tin target and " Mort 
pour la trance." 



"AMBULANCE 464" 157 

(cadet) there named Lucot. When he learned 
that I was an American, he was just as anxious 
to talk to me as I was curious to examine the 
battery. He took me around to the officers' 
abri and introduced me to his captain and two 
lieutenants. After they had shown me several 
of the guns and carefully explained the mechanism 
of each and also of the machine which sets the time- 
fuses, they took me down into the deep munition 
dugouts where they pointed with great pleasure to 
a number of American made shells. Then they 
did something entirely unexpected. They invited 
me into dinner. I knew this would be a thousand 
times better than my menu of army bread, and 
since there was very little chance of blesses arriving 
at the post for two or three hours, I accepted at 
once. The meal was served in the captain's abri, 
with ten feet of carefully laid earth and logs between 
us and any Boche shells which might break outside. 
I was kept pretty busy through it all, trying to eat 
and answer their countless questions. They wanted 
to know how many troops we had in France, if our 
men would actually get into the trenches this fall, if 
their "75" wasn't better than our American three- 
inch gun and of course a lot of things about the 
Ambulance Service. When I had a chance I would 
question them about French and German time fuses 
or perhaps the range of different guns ; but I didn't 



158 "AMBULANCE 464" 

have many opportunities to do this. Very often 
throughout the meal, we touched our glasses and 
drank the health of the "Capitaine" or some other 
member of the party; and, as usually happens over 
here, the last toast was to "the speedy ending of the 
war." After lunch they told me they wanted some 
bright American girls for their marraines. So I 
wrote down the names and addresses of four of my 
friends at home whom I thought would be willing to 
correspond with them. Then I described each one in 
turn and let each officer pick the one he wanted. It 
was very funny the way they debated about the girls. 
They decided that Lucot should take the youngest, 
who was very intelligent and quite small, because he 
also was young and small, although he didn't come 
up to the intelligence standard; the captain pre- 
ferred the tall and sedate brunette because his grand- 
mother was tall and sedate. The lieutenants had a 
terrible dispute over the remaining two, one of whom 
was a marvelous dancer and the other very beauti- 
ful. They ended the argument at last by throwing 
up a two-franc piece and calling the pretty girl heads 
and the dancer tails. 

After dinner, Lucot showed me the road which 
the ravitaillement wagons use at night when they go 
up to the second and third line trenches. I don't be- 
lieve the road to Esnes itself was ever in such terri- 
ble condition. As far as you could see it wound on 



"AMBULANCE 464" 159 

with little holes, medium sized holes and real "420s" 
everywhere. It is just about like walking from one 
hole to another. Occasionally when we would come 
to one of the really big ones, there wouldn't be any 
road at all, only a great crater thirty feet across and 
easily fifteen deep. 

I was obliged to return to the post at two o'clock 
and Lucot was kind enough to walk back with me. 
On the way I took a few photographs of a big mine 
which exploded in March 19 15 when the French 
made a three-mile advance here. We walked all 
through the former Boche trenches and the old "No 
Man's Land" which is only a couple of hundred 
yards from the battery. Our conversation was 
very peculiar, for everything he said was in English, 
which he had studied for five years, and I answered 
him in French, as well as I could. 

There were no blesses during the afternoon but I 
stuck pretty close to the post on account of the rather 
long time I had spent at the battery. I am writing 
by my petrol lamp in the brancardiers' abri. 



July ^th, 19 1 7. Post at Jonchery. 

Everybody in the section is hopping mad. Here's 
the biggest celebration of the year coming off in 
Paris today. The first of our troops to arrive in 
France will parade and the whole city will be wild 
with joy; and they won't allow a single one of us 
even a forty-eight-hour furlough to see it. All 
the other sections are sending in ten or twelve men 
apiece but we will have to fool around out here and 
be satisfied with a bottle of champagne apiece, 
and an omelet for breakfast. I won't even get this, 
for I am on duty here at Jonchery while the rest are 
having the treat at the cantonment in Ferme de 
Piemont. 

This post is a relay on the way to Pont Suippes 
and is worked in the same manner as Esnes and 
Montzeville used to be. I started out at the former 
yesterday morning and have gone back and forth 
many times since then. At Pont Suippes we have 
to leave our cars in one particular place or they will 
be spotted by one of the dozen German sausages 
which are busy from dawn till dusk just across the 
lines. One of the Generals' chauffeurs stopped his 
machine recently in an unprotected place near the 

160 



"AMBULANCE 464" 161 

bridge and while waiting there alone was killed by 
a balloon-directed shell. The Frenchmen showed 
me where it all happened. Afterwards, I bickered 
with them for a lot of time-fuses which they had 
dug up from some neighboring shell holes. I gave 
one fellow a dollar Ingersoll watch for five perfect 
fuses, including two aluminum ones for which he had 
been obliged to dig down four feet into the earth. 
While we were bargaining, a brancardier came to- 
wards us with a huge eel which he had caught in 
the stream of "Suippes." He skinned it in the abri, 
and we had "eel a la tranchee" for lunch. It wasn't 
a bit bad. 

While I was taking a few snapshots of the shell 
holes around the abri and in the little cemetery across 
the road, I ran across a young artillery lieutenant. 
I could see that he hadn't been out of Fontainebleau 
long and I thought perchance he might know Lucot 
or Bernard Lar Lenque, both of whom studied there 
last year. He let out a great yell when I mentioned 
the latter's name, and seizing my hand, told me 
that Bernard was his cousin. His own name was 
Christian Thurneyssen. Of course he wanted to 
know all about him, where I had met him and how 
he was getting along. Only the day before he had 
learned that Bernard had been wounded. We had 
a long talk together, and in the end I promised to 
look up his family when I went into Paris. 



1 62 "AMBULANCE 464" 

I will probably leave the section next week. Con- 
sequently I am gathering a lot of souvenirs to take 
back home with me. Gilmore said the fine lot he 
lugged all the way back to Italy with him, when he 
was on his permission, was not appreciated by his 
family. He had thought they would go wild over 
the fuses and helmets but they hardly looked at 
them. There was some excuse for them, however, 
because they had been seeing things like these ever 
since Italy entered the war. I think it will be differ- 
ent in America; anyway, I am taking back a couple 
of hundred pounds of junk. This evening I added a 
Boche canteen, a common soldier's flashlight and one 
of their trench knives to my collection. I got them 
from a poilu who didn't want to give them up at all, 
because his permission was coming soon; but when I 
explained how interested the people in America 
would be in them and parted with my fountain pen, 
a compass and one of my many Ingersoll watches, 
to help with the persuasion, he yielded. 

Last night I watched the "tir de Barrage" of a 
German attack and I was happy. A terrific bom- 
bardment started just an hour ago a couple miles 
north of us and the sky overhead was made bril- 
liant by bursting shells. Then several of our own 
nearby batteries began hammering away in answer 
to the red fire "Artillery Wanted" signals sent up 
from the first line trenches; and gradually every 



"AMBULANCE 464" 163 

available gun along our front got into action. From 
all sides came the glare from the mouths of busy 
seventy-fives. And with it all were the star-light 
shells which broke forth behind the curtain of fire 
and showed to us, as we stood upon the sand-bags 
over the abri, a great wall of smoke. Now and 
then, when a slight lull came between the roar of the 
shells, we could hear the familiar rat-tat-tat of the 
machine guns. The thing kept increasing in volume 
until every battery was going to its limit; and as I 
watched it, I pictured the first line trenches turned 
into inferno; and I was glad I was not there. 

I had a few hours sleep afterwards in a stuffy 
little underground room where six of the brancar- 
diers bunk. But they called me out at midnight 
when the blesses from the attack began to come in. 
After three or four runs to Suippes I ended up here 
at Jonchery at five this morning. But instead of 
going to bed as I should have, I spent an hour trying 
to chip off the compression of a Boche "210" which 
had fallen near my car. It had certainly been put 
on to stay, for I broke my Ford screw-driver prying 
on it. I had to be satisfied with a mere six inch 
piece because my monkey wrench which was the only 
tool left that might have worked, wouldn't fit into 
the groove. . . . 

I had breakfast with the undertakers who are the 
only people besides ourselves in the village. There 



1 64 "AMBULANCE 464" 

are no brancardiers here since it is a relay station; 
and so we eat with them. They are a queer lot, 
simply four old soldiers who can't fight any more, 
who have been detailed to bury all the dead from 
one of our regiments, the two hundred and twenty- 
first. They showed me the record which they keep 
of the bodies and it contained the names of twenty 
soldiers who have been killed during the six days 
the division has been in the trenches. I had no 
idea that the mortality would be so low along an 
average front like Champagne at the present time. 
For this means less than one man in ten killed in a 
whole year of fighting. I told them that I was go- 
ing back to America soon and they gave me, to take 
along a souvenir, one of the little red, white and 
blue targets which are placed on the grave of every 
French soldier. 

The town seems to have received two very heavy 
bombardments since the war began. While I was 
wandering around taking pictures, after I left the 
members of the cemetery department, I came across 
a house, not so badly wrecked as the others, from 
which, if I climbed up onto the roof, I thought I 
might get a good view of the trenches. The stairs 
leading up to the second floor had been shot away; 
and as I was hunting for some projecting timber by 
which I might pull myself up, my eyes fell upon two 
inscriptions scrawled upon the plaster. The first 



"AMBULANCE 464" 165 

one said that five people, probably those who had 
been living in the house, had been killed here in 
March, 191 5. And from the one below it, I gath- 
ered that three soldiers who had been passing 
through the village and had stopped in the house 
over night, had lost their lives in a bombardment 
in July, 19 1 6. . . . I went upstairs afterwards 
and was surprised to find a crop of hay growing in 
the front bed-room. Then I climbed up on the roof 
and took several photographs of Mont Haut when a 
lot of shells were breaking upon its summit. I got 
another rather interesting picture during the morn- 
ing. This was of the church in St. Hilare le Grand, 
between here and Pont Suippes. Most of the steeple 
has been shot away but the old clock is still hang- 
ing there, suspended only by the cement on one side. 
We know the exact time the building was shelled, for 
the hands point to half-past one. 

My twenty-four hours were up an hour ago, and 
no one has come to relieve me as yet. I can't com- 
plain though, for I would be late too, if I were hav- 
ing a good breakfast. 



July 6th. Tirage at Suippes. 

Mike O'Connor and I have been out here all day 
and only had one run apiece. The post here is a 
"tirage," where all the blesses from the other posts 
are left and then taken by the men on duty there to 
the hospitals at Cuperly and St. Hilare au Temple. 
If these become overcrowded they are sent on to 
base hospitals at Chalons or Bar-le-Duc; and from 
there any cases which require special attention or a 
long period of recuperation are sent into Paris by 
train. Like all the other towns near the front, 
Suippes has been shelled considerably and occa- 
sionally even now the Boches drop in a few obus. 
They take particular delight in banging away at the 
railroad station, for though the inhabitants have 
been forced to leave the village, all the military sup- 
plies for this sector are brought up here by train. 
A poilu was killed here only yesterday by a 
"210." Mike and I got permission for a few 
minutes off about noon. We walked over to 
the church which was unharmed, with the ex- 
ception of the belfry which had been torn away. 
The four bells were lying where they fell, in front 
of the altar, and the statues of two angels, kneeling 

166 



"AMBULANCE 464" 167 

in prayer, stood behind them. It was such an odd 
scene that I took several photos of it. Then we 
found some poilus who had a number of vases they 
had painstakingly hammered out from brass shell 
casings. I gave one of my Ingersolls for a pair of 
seventy-fives, decorated with a sort of grape-vine 
design, and five francs for four cute little "37" 
vases. Then we each bought a briquet, modelled af- 
ter the French army canteen and exceedingly well 
put together. They told us it took a whole week to 
make one; but it keeps them busy during those 
periods when they almost go crazy from the mo- 
notony of the life. 

There is a large field between here and Ferme de 
Piemont where they have machine-gun and hand- 
grenade practice. Stanley, Sammy Lloyd and my- 
self walked there last Sunday and looked the place 
over. We got into conversation with some sol- 
diers and soon they were telling us how to throw 
hand-grenades. We claimed that the American 
method, the baseball way, was much better and 
proved it by hurling one of the cast iron bombs 
about the size of a lemon, fully fifty feet farther 
than their best mark. But they explained and 
rightly enough, too, that their over-arm method 
never tires one very much; whereas ours does, after 
very few throws. 



July $th. Cantonment at Ferme de Piemont. 

Since our arrival here I have been aching to visit 
the captured Boche trenches near Auberive which 
the French took in their recent Champagne offen- 
sive. And so when I learned from "Chef" Coan, 
after I came in yesterday, that I wouldn't be on duty 
at Bois Carre or Pont Suippes again before I left 
the section, I arranged matters so that Mike O'Con- 
nor and I could start out early and bum around 
for three or four hours before it was time for the 
other car to come in. We left the cantonment at 
four this morning, missed a couple of shells rather 
nicely near the Mourmelon fork and arrived at 
Bois Carre just as the first German sausage was 
popping up over the horizon. I intended to 
head for Auberive which is about a mile 
from the post and although now in French hands is 
nevertheless only a few hundred yards from the pres- 
ent lines. But somehow we got into the wrong boyau 
and wandered several miles out of our way before 
we realized where we were. We had to give up the 
Auberive scheme altogether and go north towards 
Moronvilliers. But there was no direct route to the 
old German lines here and we were obliged to crawl 

168 



"AMBULANCE 464" 169 

through a lot of unfinished trenches and others 
blocked with barbed-wire. Finally it got so bad we 
were forced into the open for several hundred yards. 
This would have been quite safe a mile behind the 
front lines at La Harazee, where it is very hilly; but 
in this flat country you can be seen two or three miles 
away, and at one mile you are taking somewhat of a 
chance. It was exactly an hour and a half after we 
left Bois Carre that we saw the first sign of old Ger- 
man occupation. This was a large pile of hand-gren- 
ades which were unmistakably Boche. Then came an 
Abri with "Sicherheit hier" written on one of the 
timbers and I noticed that it was quite carefully built. 
It occurred to me as I read the words, how strange 
it was that the people of Goethe's race should be our 
enemies in a war like this. Now we ran into an old 
supply station where barbed-wire, shells and trench 
torpedoes lay scattered around. Across from this, 
but still in the trench, was a grave, marked by a 
simple wooden cross. And I noticed that the name 
inscribed upon it was German and that he be- 
longed to the foreign legion of the French Army. 
They lost a good many thousand men when they 
took Mont Cornillet and Mont Haut here. I 
picked up a Boche helmet a little farther on; the 
wearer had been killed by a shell splinter which 
penetrated the steel. The blood had rusted it and 
we could see traces of it quite plainly. Unfor- 



170 "AMBULANCE 464" 

tunately we had to return to the post before eight- 
thirty so we had very little time there. We took as 
many souvenirs as we could carry, including two un- 
exploded torpedos and an Austrian "88." Just as we 
were leaving, we asked one of the poilus who was at 
work putting the trenches into shape once more, if 
he had seen any "77" cartridge cases lying about. 
And instead of giving us an empty one, what did he 
do but pick up a whole loaded shell and slam it 
against the side of the trench until it came apart. 
Then he dumped all the powder out on the ground 
and gave us the casing. 

On our way back we had a close call. We had 
gone only a short distance when we found we were 
heading straight for a battery which the Boches were 
shelling. There was no other way to the post ex- 
cept by a long detour; so we decided to chance it, 
figuring that we could get past in the four minute 
interval at which the shells seemed to be coming. 
But we weren't quite quick enough and a big fellow 
burst about seventy-five yards away just as we got 
there. Eclat shot by us and over our heads and a 
few seconds later twigs and small branches from 
the nearby trees began to patter down around us. 
We didn't stop here, not even long enough to take a 
picture. As soon as we arrived at the post we 
dumped the souvenirs into the rear of Frutiger's car. 




* S^S 




i. A pill box or German machine gun post, made of solid concrete. In daytime the 
slits are covered with burlap sacking. 

2. The entrance to another German machine «un post. The roof is composed of two 
feet of steel rails, corrugated iron and heavy timbers. 

3. J. T. Lloyd of Cornell in a "210" shell hole. The Boches, firing from twelve miles 
away, missed the railroad tracks (in the background) at which tney were hring, by ten feet. 



"AMBULANCE 464" 171 

I was to ride back to Ferme de Piemont with him 
and he left shortly afterwards. 

Like some of the poilus, we have the craze for 
unloading everything we think would make a good 
souvenir. Every day somebody brings in a hand- 
grenade or a new kind of fuse and there is always 
somebody foolish enough to monkey with it. I sup- 
pose we have carried five or six poilus already, 
wounded as they were taking something apart and 
yet we go right ahead with it. Today Payne of- 
fered Frazer the revolver which he borrowed from 
the little armory in the barn at Suippes if the lat- 
ter would unload his big Boche torpedo. And al- 
though he had only two days more to spend in the 
section and didn't know a single thing about the con- 
struction of the affair, since it was German, he put 
it in a vise in the tool-room, and took it apart with 
a pipewrench. It could have gone off just as well 
as not and he wouldn't have been any the wiser. It 
doesn't wound like a hand grenade, it kills. 



172 



"AMBULANCE 464" 



GERMAN TRENCH TORPEDO 




The base is made of iron, so molded that the torpedo 
will break up into 98 squares. It can be shot either 
from a gun or catapult. It is exploded when the percus- 
sion cap on the extreme right strikes the ground. The 
tin rudders in the rear keep it from turning over in the air. 

This is the same torpedo, the unloading which is de- 
scribed in the diary of July 8, 1917. Although this par- 
ticular type weighs only five or six pounds, there are 
some in use which are one hundred times as heavy. 



July gth f 19 17. Ferme de Piemont. 

It's a true saying that a Ford will run anywhere 
you take it. Frutiger ran his machine into a tree 
on the Suippes road, but instead of climbing it as 
the Ford joke-book would have it, the car bounded 
over to the opposite side of the road and laid there 
for several minutes on its back with the rear wheels 
spinning around at a great rate, before he was able 
to shut off the motor. Then he waited until a 
couple of Frenchmen came along and with their help 
turned it right side up again. After this he thanked 
them and rode off as though nothing had happened. 

Sammy Lloyd told me some time ago of the 
munition depot over the hill, and so this morning we 
took our cameras and walked up there. About 
twenty soldiers were working on a pile of twelve 
inch shells ( u 28o's") when we arrived, arranging 
them in long rows and covering them afterwards 
with a sort of pine-bough camouflage. They thought 
it fine to have their pictures taken; and I got the 
two strongest men in the crowd to lift one of the big 
projectiles for me while I took the photograph. 
They managed to hold it up several seconds al- 
though it weighs four hundred and fifty pounds. 

173 



174 "AMBULANCE 464" 

Then their sergeant showed us the whole depot, and 
told us that although they had 50,000 shells stored 
there, they were so carefully concealed that the 
Boche aviators couldn't tell them from common un- 
derbrush. 



July ii, 1917. My last day with good old Section 

Twelve. 

Benney and I left the Section for good today. 
He goes to Avord to enter the Aviation School and 
I am going home by way of England. I'd a thou- 
sand times rather stay in France until the war's over 
but the family doesn't agree with me. Both of the 
last two cables from America read "Home." 
Therefore I must go home to argue it out. We 
have been packing most of the morning and getting 
our souvenirs so mixed with our clothes that they 
don't look suspicious. I have two hundred and sixty 
pounds of stuff which I hope I can get in all right. 
We are waiting for the camionette now to come and 
take us into Chalons. I have finished saying good- 
bye to the fellows and have just snapped a last pic- 
ture of a group of them together in front of Ray 
William's car, smoking their good old Bull Durham. 
As for old 464, I patted her radiator in a last fond 
caress and gave her a final drink of water five min- 
utes ago. Dear old "Shen-ick-a-day-dy," as the 
poilus call her. 



175 



V 
COMING BACK 



V 

July 14th. 5 Rue he Kain, Paris. 

Paris is wonderful now, far prettier than before, 
and I hate to think of leaving next Saturday. But 
I have decided to go to England with two Ambu- 
lance fellows, Anderson and Lillie, and spend two or 
three weeks there. Then I shall sail from Liver- 
pool and get home about the middle of August. I 
tried to get some information concerning the army- 
transports and the possibility of shipping home on 
one. None of the army officers, however, could tell 
me anything about the dates and arrivals of ships, ex- 
cepting that St. Nazaire was one of the ports. If 
my funds run low in England, I may be obliged to 
return to France and take passage home this way. 
I spent the whole morning yesterday trying to get 
my passport vised by the numerous officials, such as 
the police and consuls, so that I might leave France. 
At one place they told me I couldn't go to England 
at all, but I didn't bother with them. I went to the 
British Permit office and found that I could. I was 
all ready to go, after a few hours chasing around, 
while a young English governess whom I met at the 

179 



180 "AMBULANCE 464" 

Prefecture of Police told me she had been waiting 
three months to have her papers approved and 
hadn't received them yet. 

You can't help spending money in Paris. Be- 
sides the usual little items such as cafes, opera and 
expensive meals, you want to buy everything you see. 
I have just paid out two hundred and ten francs for 
a new uniform for use in England, and one hundred 
and fifty more for a few little Parisian trinkets to 
take back to the family. Dinner last evening with 
Anderson cost me forty alone, and some films and 
printing paper at Kodaks, brought this up to ninety. 
Every time I change a one-hundred-franc note I see 
my chances as a first-class passenger on the trip home 
getting smaller and smaller. 

Bernard Larlenque, the young artillery officer 
whom I met in the hospital at Chalons last month, 
is now in Paris. We went down together to the 
Avenue St. Germain early this morning to see the 
great "Independence Day" parade. I had heard 
about it before but I never imagined that it was such 
a big event. Fully fifty thousand troops marched 
by, the banner regiments of the French army. Ev- 
eryone was happy, childishly happy, from the tiniest 
spectator who cheered with all his might to the sol- 
diers themselves who brandished bouquets from their 
bayonets. When one of the crack "chasseur" com- 
panies was passing us, a handsome young woman 



"AMBULANCE 464" 181 

darted forth from her place among the onlookers 
and gave a little bunch of roses to the captain 
leading them. He took the flowers, stooped and 
kissed her, and then marched on amid the deafening 
applause of the crowd. Shortly after this I got a 

fine close-up picture of General G , one of the 

most famous chasseur generals, who dismounted 
from his horse to shake hands with a few wounded 
Algerians standing beside us on crutches, when the 
whole parade had stopped for a moment. 

I took dinner with Bernard afterwards at his 
home near the Etoile and spent several hours with 
his charming family. His father is a captain in 
the artillery, his seventeen-year-old brother leaves 
for the front next month, and the one, fourteen, a 
Boy Scout, is working on a farm. None of these 
were present when I was there, but I saw the three 
younger children with their mother, who is most at- 
tractive. 



July 1 8. Paris still. 

I have had a pretty full program since the day of 
the parade. Sunday I dined again at the Lar- 
lenque's and afterwards Bernard and I promenaded 
on the Avenue Bois de Boulogne. There were uni- 
forms of all the allied armies, even a few American 
scattered in the throng. Afterwards we called on 
the Thurneyssens, the parents of the aspirant whom 
I met at Pont Suippes. I left with them some pic- 
tures I had taken of him at the front. I stood there 
like a perfect dummy when Bernard introduced me 
to the Madame, for I discovered for the first time I 
didn't know a single word of polite-society French. 
I almost let slip the poilu equivalent for "glad to 
know you, old chap," but it dawned on me that I 
was in Paris, not at the front, and I kept silent. 
Showing her the photographs, however, started the 
ball rolling and I had no trouble after that. 

Even the French are crazy about Charlie Chaplin. 
Barney Faith and I saw him in "The Vagabond" at 
the Passy Cinema this evening! 

Just as I am leaving, the front gets active again. 
Mont Cornillet is seeing some very heavy artillery 
fire once more and the French are launching a big 

182 



"AMBULANCE 464" 183 

attack at Hill 304. We have had more men killed 
in the last month than in the whole history of the 
Service. Craig, of Section Two, was hit by shell 
eclat near Dombasle and died a few hours later. A 
bomb from a German aeroplane got Norton of Sec- 
tion One yesterday, and Gailey and Hamilton were 
mortally wounded near Soissons last week. Then 
there were several other cases I have forgotten; and 
of course, Osborne of Twenty-eight, whose funeral 
we attended at Mourmelon. 

Anderson, Lillie and I leave for London tomor- 
row morning; Lillie, to rest up after eight months 
with Section Ten in Albania, and Anderson, for his 
furlough. 



July 23. Regent Palace Hotel } London. 

We had an uneventful Channel trip from Havre 
to Southampton escorted by three British de- 
stroyers and zig-zagging the entire distance. We 
had no trouble at either port, fortunately, and went 
up to London on the next train. We chose the 
Regent Palace in Piccadilly as our hotel because it 
had been recommended as the place where all 
"officers" back from France spent their permissions. 

Ever since we arrived, we have been on the go. 
Sometimes it's sightseeing, and again it is shopping, 
and every evening we try the theatres. Last night we 
saw the "Maid of the Mountains/' and the day be- 
fore, "Inside the Lines." There are far more amuse- 
ment places open here than in Paris, and a good 
many more civilians. The people seem happier — 
I suppose because they have not had the war brought 
as close to them as the French. Early Sunday morn- 
ing the "Air Raid" alarms sounded all over the city 
and everyone rushed outside to get a better view of 
the enemy's planes, instead of going down into the 
cellar as the officials expect them to do. 

Several days ago I found a place called the "In- 
dian Restaurant." Never thinking that this meant 

184 




i. A pile of dead Boches south of Mt. Cornillet. They are lying in the hot sun, and 
being eaten up by the flies. After a big attack it is often weeks before all the dead can be 
buried. 



2. Two German prisoners, sleeping on a couple of ties in 
near the front. They will soon be removed from the war zone. 



barbed-wire inclosure, 



"AMBULANCE 464" 185 

East instead of West Indian, I went in and ordered 
a meal. They brought me the queerest mess of 
food I have ever run across. And all of it, from 
the soup to the rice, was full of terrible curry. I 
finally gave it up and asked for some plain bread 
and butter. But they refused on the ground that I 
had already eaten the one piece which the food con- 
trollers allow at a meal. This scheme is really far 
more effective than the two wheatless days a week 
which they first tried. For it cuts down the use 
of white bread more than half, whereas the other 
way means only a ten or fifteen per cent reduction. 
We are saluted everywhere. Once in a while 
a Tommy gets suspicious and doesn't bother with 
us, but usually he gives us a real snappy one. It 
was a lot of fun answering him at first, but when 
you have to give a couple of thousand every day, it 
gets tiresome. Of course they think we are com- 
missioned officers or they wouldn't look at us. Even 
some old veterans of the Crimean war were fooled 
the other day and I felt so cheap afterwards that I 
wanted to turn around and tell them what I was. 
But except for this, our uniforms are a great help. 
By their aid we managed to hire a Hupmobile for 
the whole day yesterday, when half a dozen places 
had told us it was impossible to rent a car on account 
of the great scarcity of gasoline. They said they 
didn't even have enough for themselves. We toured 



186 "AMBULANCE 464" 

up to Cambridge in the morning, through a number 
of pretty little villages with "Mother Goose" names. 
It was rather exciting at times for neither Anderson 
nor I had driven a Hup before; besides, the sudden 
change from driving on the right hand side of the 
road to the left, which is the English way, was hard 
to get used to. Lillie showed us around the Uni- 
versity; Pembroke, where he himself had studied, 
and Christ's, Trinity and Kings Colleges. The only 
students left are a few East Indians and some young 
boys. The majority of colleges have been taken 
over by the government for training schools. Lillie 
learned from his proctor that three of his intimate 
friends had been killed in the Service and that prac- 
tically everyone in the university had enlisted. 

I'm spending my money even faster here than I 
did in Paris. I ordered two new suits and a snappy 
raincoat from a tailor in Southampton Row. I 
walked over to the British Museum while I was up 
there, but found it had been closed for over a year. 
Fully a dozen people had told me before I went 
there that it was still open — like the French in Paris, 
Londoners don't know London's attractions. 



July i^th y 19 17. Halsway Manor, Somerset. 

London was new and interesting and I liked it; 
but this is really England here. Cardiff lies across 
the channel, in Wales, and Bristol lies on one side of 
us and the old forest of Exmoor on the other. 
Then south of us is Cornwall, the land of King 
Arthur and of Jack-the-Giant-Killer. We're just 
outside of Crowcombe and the hills behind the house 
overlook the sea. I am visiting Mrs. Rowcliffe, an 
old friend of my mother's whom the family had told 
me about before I left home. She and her husband 
have a wonderful estate here, with a quaint old 
manor, part of which was built in the thirteenth cen- 
tury. When I came here, I intended to stay only one 
night, but this is the third day now, and I am still 
here. Everything is new to me, from the heather 
and the bracken on the hills behind the manor to 
the low thatched cottages and the people themselves. 
Then there is the age of all the buildings. To think 
of living in a house built seven hundred years ago ! 
But there are landmarks far older than this. The 
carpenter who drove me up from Stogumber Sta- 
tion to the Rowcliffe's, showed me a crude circle on 
the hillside, the remains of a Roman encampment; 

187 



1 88 "AMBULANCE 464" 

and from there on we drove up a rocky little lane 
over which the Phoenicians used to carry their tin to 
the sea. 

Out here you can't believe there's a war, it's all 
so quiet and peaceful. I have only seen one Tommy 
since I've been here and he was some distance off, 
down on the main road. But the young men are 
gone just the same, though the people don't talk 
about it. There are no slackers loafing around. The 
gardener's boy is at the front, they tell me, with the 
Royal Engineers, and the only son of Colonel Gor- 
don, who lives by himself in the village now, after 
thirty years in India, has just been killed in aviation. 
Every week or two some sad news like this comes 
to the little place. They have only a few young 
fellows left. 



July 30. Paris once more. 

England turned out financially just as I thought 
it would. It ended with either cabling home for 
money (when I had received two hundred extra 
already), trying steerage from Liverpool, or the 
transport idea. I figured that the last, although per- 
haps a wild goose chase, would be much cheaper 
than either of the other ways and whatever hap- 
pened, far more interesting. So here I am, back 
in Paris again and ready to leave in an hour for St. 
Nazaire. I got by the customs all right this morning 
in Havre, but arrived at the depot just as they closed 
the baggage car of the train; and, of course, I 
couldn't put on my steamer trunk and duffel bag. 
In great agony I watched it pull out, leaving me to 
a ten hour wait for the next through-train to Paris. 
It wasn't as much of a sacrifice as I thought it was 
going to be, for I managed to persuade the T. M. 
office here to give me a free ticket all the way to St. 
Nazaire, a distance of more than four hundred and 
fifty miles. Later I had a fine game of billiards in 
the back room of an old hotel with a convalescent 
English captain. Being in France once more gave 

189 



190 "AMBULANCE 464" 

me the notion that everyone ought to speak French. 
I became quite angry with a Tommy guarding a 
freight yard entrance when I politely asked him, 
"Ou est la Rue Cherbourg?", and he looked at me 
with a blank expression on his face. We had a good 
laugh together when I discovered my mistake. 

I carted all my luggage in a taxi to the Gare du 
Quai d'Orsay this morning and afterwards went up 
to Rue Raynouard to say good-bye to the fellows. 
Williams, Dixon, Gilmore and Frutiger are in from 
our section, and a number of other men whom I met 
at the front, from other sections. One hundred and 
ten new men arrived last week and a hundred the 
week before. This rapid increase from the paltry 
fifteen who came last January on the Espagne has 
forced the Field Service additional quarters. Bar- 
racks are being erected all over the grounds and the 
annex at 5 Rue Le Kain is housing seventy or eighty 
more. 

I spent a few hours at 21 Rue Raynouard, where 
I got a couple of letters and some photos to take 
back to America for the fellows, and bade them all 
farewell. Then I darted around the corner to 
the little convent laundry near the cinema, burst in 
among the startled nuns, got the shirts and hand- 
kerchiefs I had left there before I left for England 
and took the Metro to the Place de l'Opera. A 



"AMBULANCE 464" 191 

quick supper at Duvals with Henry Houston and 
then over to the Quai d'Orsay again. I am sitting in 
the train there now. It is due to leave in three 
minutes. 



August 2nd. On Board the Transport 

Florence Luckenbach, 

In the Basin at 

St. Nazaire. 

I arrived here at seven-thirty yesterday morning 
after sitting up all night from Paris. I left my bag- 
gage in the depot and started immediately for the 
docks to see how my prospects for a ride home 
looked. There was nothing in the first basin, but 
the watchman there told me there were a number of 
American transports further down. But alas, when 
I finally located them, the marines on guard wouldn't 
let me go near, to ask about a job for the trip. 
And the answer they gave me at the base office was 
even worse. It was impossible. They couldn't al- 
low it. These were transports for army supplies, 
not for lugging back bankrupt ambulance drivers. 
A hot breakfast after this cheered me up a little 
and I tried to break through the marines again. 
This time I tackled another bunch, told a pa- 
thetic story and they let me through on the 
sly. The captain was not on board, but one of the 
quartermaster clerks was, and after I had told him 
all about myself, he said he would fix me up, even if 

192 



''AMBULANCE 464" 193 

I had to go as a stowaway. There was a good 
chance to work my passage, however, for the chief 
steward and the cook were in the city jail, and they 
needed an extra man. They had just taken on a big 
negro the day before as messboy and I was offered a 
similar job. I signed the articles before he could 
think twice, put my luggage on board with the ship's 
crane, and had it down in the poop that night, before 
they could fire me. He told me the captain would be 
back from Paris the next day and hinted that I ex- 
change my cane and good looking uniform for a 
somewhat tougher costume, one more becoming to a 
messboy's position. So when I appeared for work 
that evening in the pantry, I had on a rough khaki 
shirt and the old breeches I'd worn all the months at 
the front. The two other messboys gave me a 
hearty welcome; their work would be lighter now. 
They didn't let me do much because it was my first 
meal and they thought I had better get used to it 
slowly. I washed something like two hundred 
dishes, in a thick, pasty lot of water which they only 
change once a day, cleaned up the two mess rooms, 
and scrubbed the floor of the pantry afterwards. It 
is delightfully interesting work. I imagine two 
weeks of it will lead me to decide upon it as my life's 
occupation. 

While I was working I learned a little about the 
boat and the men on it. It seems the most of them 



i 9 4 "AMBULANCE 464" 

came over just for the novelty of going to France; 
they had had a rather disagreeable trip and now that 
they were finally in France they were only allowed 
to leave the boat on special permission. Even then 
they couldn't leave St. Nazaire, which is a little town 
and not too interesting. None of them knew more 
than a few words of French, but it was a simple mat- 
ter getting what they wanted in their time off duty. 
As for the fellows in jail, they had been impudent and 
insulting to the officers and would probably be taken 
back to America in irons. They didn't know exactly 
when the boat was to sail, but told me confidentially, 
it wouldn't be more than a day or two, since only the 
flour and eight of the big guns remained to be un- 
loaded. They had taken fourteen days to cross; and 
figuring on this, we will get home about the nine- 
teenth of August. Jack Fenton, the quartermaster 
clerk who signed me up, said I could sleep on the 
settee in his cabin tonight. So I am tucked up on it 
now, with a port-hole above me instead of the canvas 
curtain on the rear of my ambulance. 



August \th y 19 17. On the Transport Luckenbach, 

At Sea. 

I thought my game was up for sure when the 
captain came back yesterday. He had almost de- 
cided to take me when suddenly it entered his mind 
that the colonel of the Base wouldn't approve of it. 
So off he sent me to that gentleman, at whose very 
office I had had so abrupt a dismissal the day before. 
But Fenton went along with me and together we 
made them think that I was necessary for the safe 
return of the Luckenbach. I was so happy on the 
way back to the boat that I accosted a German road 
worker under an American guard, to see if I could 
get his little cap for a souvenir. But the old boy 
(he must have been forty-five) said: "Ich wurde, 
aber es ist verboten" ; and as one of his comrades 
explained, the French require them to wear the coat 
and cap of their uniforms, if they still have them, 
when they get out of the war zone. This forms a 
pretty good means of identification. 

Late Sunday night the good news came that we 
were to sail early the next morning, and along with 
it, something not quite so encouraging. This was 
that two steamers had been sunk in the harbor out- 

195 



196 "AMBULANCE 464" 

side the city; and another, whose water tight com- 
partments had held, had barely been able to get to 
port. From the reports we got, one would have 
thought there was a squadron of submarines waiting 
for us. But orders are orders, and therefore 
at five this morning, with all fifty-seven of the 
crew on deck, we sailed down the Loire, through two 
or three locks, and out into the ocean. In a way I 
am glad to be going home. Yet leaving now, when 
our troops are just arriving and when I could get 
into any branch of the service from aviation to 
artillery, merely to enter college, doesn't seem 
exactly right. But the family can't see it my way. 
My regular mess-boy duties have started now. I 
was up at four this morning, to make coffee for the 
engineers and the officer on the bridge. I'd never 
made the stuff before, but I dumped two or three 
cups of grounds into an old pot, stole some hot water 
from the cook's steam-chest and let it boil on the 
back of the stove while I fixed some toast to go along 
with it. They complimented me on it when I took 
it to them at five o'clock, said it was nice and soapy, 
and hoped someone else would make it the next 
time. After this I washed the dishes from the mid- 
night-lunch of the crew, and then started chamber- 
maiding the rooms. You not only have to make the 
beds carefully, fold the pajamas and straighten out 
the clothes of some measly under-officer whom you 




i. The exterior of a " 75 " battery. A large sheet of canvas conceals the place 
from the enemy when the gun is not in use. 

2. The interior of the "75 "shelter. A sheet of armor plate protects the artillerymen 
from enemy-fire in front. On the left is a machine for setting time fuses. 

3. A little French town in the hands of the enemy and the trenches leading from it. 
The dots are shell craters, some of which are thirty feet across. The photograph was 
taken from a French aeroplane at 10,000 feet. 




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"AMBULANCE 464" 197 

wouldn't have for a gardener at home, but you must 
even scrub out his wash bowl and keep his brasses 
in good condition. I almost fell out of the port-hole 
today when one of the engineers suggested that I re- 
move the tobacco stains that I had left on his cuspi- 
dor. Only a few of them are cranky like this, how- 
ever. They treat me pretty well ; and Marty, one of 
my partners, says we will make twenty or thirty dol- 
lars in tips if we keep their rooms shipshape. I fig- 
ure I ought to clear fifty dollars on the trip, counting 
my salary, at forty-five dollars a month and board, 
which I signed for. A first class passage on the 
Cunard line would cost one hundred dollars at 
least, so I am earning one hundred fifty dollars just 
by two weeks of delightful work. 

When meal time comes around, Marty sets the 
mess room table and gets things ready in general 
around the pantry, while John, the head mess-boy, 
puts the officers' saloon in order. I bring all the 
food in from the kitchen, stuff it into the little steam- 
table in the corner and then go into the stewards 
room to copy the menu. Yesterday I tried it in 
French, but it didn't prove a great success, for when 
I asked the captain if he would like Hors d'ceuvres 
for a starter to Sunday night's supper, he said, "Yes, 
he hadn't had any good vegetable soup for a long 
time." 

Fenton can't keep me any longer on his settee; so 



198 "AMBULANCE 464" 

he has found a place for me in the hole where the 
other mess-boys bunk. It's a little bit of a room, 
barely large enough for two. But they have rigged 
up a shelf for a bed which, although crude and too 
short for me, is better than the stretcher I used at 
the front. The only really unfortunate feature 
about the place is the terrible odor which seems to 
come through the wall behind my bed. Marty says 
they pulled away the boards twice on the way over, 
in hopes of finding some dead fish or rats; there 
was nothing there and still the smell comes. I think 
I will take to the deck if it gets any worse. 



August gth. The "Dead Rat Cabin" on 

The Florence Luckenbach. 

We received an S. O. S. call on Monday from the 
Campana, one of the Standard Oil tankers. She 
had just been torpedoed in the Bay of Biscay, three 
hundred miles south of us. She went down in less 
than five minutes, the wireless operator said. An 
hour later we got "Submarine ten miles ahead" and 
this kept everybody interested until dinner time. 

Two days ago the destroyer which had convoyed 
us thus far from St. Nazaire wigwagged over that 
we were now out of the war zone and that she would 
have to leave us here. An hour later, just as a 
little squall set up, she turned her prow eastward and 
left us to the mercy of the subs. Since then it's 
become rougher and rougher and now the old tub, 
ten or twelve feet higher out of the water anyway 
than when they came over loaded, is tossing about 
like a cork. Yesterday the log read only four knots 
an hour during the forenoon, and from eight to 
eleven o'clock this morning we only made two knots. 
If our speed were to continue to decrease at this rate, 
we'd be going back towards France by tomorrow. 

The chief engineer, a jolly old Scotchman named 

199 



200 "AMBULANCE 464" 

Henderson, asked to see my pictures of the front 
today, and after we had spent some time looking at 
them, he took me down into the engine room and 
showed me the whole works. There are always one 
engineer and a couple of oilers below; but they don't 
have to work very hard. They burn crude oil in- 
stead of coal and thereby eliminate stoking. . . . 
About noon they had trouble with the big piston and 
had to stop the ship for two hours to fix it. 



August 13th, 19 17. On the Luckenbach 

1200 miles to Nantucket. 

I get along pretty well as mess-boy in the routine 
work, but now and then I pull some terrible "boner." 
I've carried dinner up to the captain's cabin when 
the wind was so strong I had to crawl up the stairs 
backwards, sitting for a moment on each step; and 
I have washed dishes when the roll of the boat al- 
most threw them out of the sink into the rag in my 
hand; but this noon my luck changed. Knowles, 
the deposed first cook, was helping Mike in the 
kitchen. It was just five minutes before lunch and 
I had given him the soup tureen to fill, so that I 
could have it ready in the pantry. The stuff was 
boiling and I had barely lifted the full kettle off the 
floor when Marty came strutting past to get the key 
to the ice box, and knocked the whole pail out of my 
hand. Poor Knowles' feet happened to be in the 
way and were badly burned before we could pull off 
his socks, and rub flour and oil on them. He went 
to bed and I guess they can't use him any more this 
trip. 

Fenton showed me the payroll this afternoon. 
There are fifteen nationalities represented among 

201 



202 "AMBULANCE 464" 

the fifty-six men in the crew. It starts out with 
twelve Americans and ends up with one Hollander, 
one Pole and a Swiss. The latter is really- 
French, I think; at least he knows Paris pretty well. 
I'm the only one on the ship who can understand 
him, since he only speaks a few words of English 
and he comes to me and tells me all his troubles. 
They call him "third cook," which position covers 
all the dirty work in the kitchen; and both of the 
other men jump on him if he peels potatoes when 
they say to sweep out the pantry and he doesn't 
understand. 

Today was bath day for the gun crew and for 
some of the rest of us too; the chief petty officer 
got permission to use the big fire hose, and then he 
squirted us while we stood stripped, on the iron 
deck, near the aft hatches. It was an Adam and 
Eve affair which I suppose doesn't often happen 
on the Mauretania or the Espagne. The bath 
freshened the gunners up so much that they fired 
four or five practice rounds from the three-inch 
gun on the stern and a good many more afterwards, 
from the machine-gun. They aimed at a soap box 
at several hundred yards, but the ship was rolling so 
badly they couldn't make a direct hit. They were 
good shots though, and handled the gun well. 

My work after supper this evening might well 
come under the comic section title, "New Occupa- 



"AMBULANCE 464" 203 

tions." — This was the pleasant task, when my 
dishes were done and the pantry floor had been care- 
fully scrubbed and fresh water taken into all the 
rooms, of teaching the second engineer logarithms. 
But I shouldn't make a joke out of it. Both of us 
were in earnest, for he was studying some mathemat- 
ics relating to his work, and never having had alge- 
bra or trigonometry in school, he came to an abrupt 
stop at logarithms. I wanted to help him ; so I got 
the second mate's book of tables which had all the 
logs I needed, and we worked two whole hours over 
it. I had to commence at the very beginning, but he 
caught on quickly and seemed to have a clear idea 
of it afterwards. 

Smith, the chief wireless operator, gave me two 
interesting reports to translate today. The first was 
some French government stuff, from one of the Afri- 
can provinces, I think, and the other was in German 
and evidently a press report from Berlin. The latter 
gave a rambling account of the resignation of the 
Bulgarian consul in Manchester. It commented upon 
the sinking of a German steamer, and made some ab- 
surd statement about a congress being held in Bom- 
bay to demand Home Rule for India. 



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August igth. YEA! New York City again. 

But still on the boat. 

The watch on the bridge sighted Nantucket light 
at midnight. At seven this morning we passed Fire 
Island lightship; then in no time came Sandy Hook, 
Fort Wadsworth, Quarantine and the battery itself. 
But the captain got orders, while we were coming 
up the river, to anchor off the Statue of Liberty 
instead of going directly to Hoboken as we had in- 
tended. It seems we took over about twenty thou- 
sand shells by mistake and had to bring them all back 
again. They must be unloaded on lighters out here 
in the river, because the law forbids the bringing of 
such a dangerous cargo into the city docks. I guess 
all we can do is to sit around here and wait until 
they finish it. They told me I would be able to get 
off for good tomorrow. 

I was so glad to see the Woolworth building once 
more that I dumped all the garbage overboard in 
the North river, when I really shouldn't have; but 
being actually at New York again, and yet tied up 
doing dirty mess-boy work on a transport rather 
irritates me. They wouldn't even let me send a tele- 
gram to the family notifying them of my arrival* but 

206 



"AMBULANCE 464" 207 

I think I can get one through tomorrow morning. 
The two captains, the chief engineer and the second 
mate, all went ashore for the evening in the launch. 
They took several of the crew with them but the 
mess-boys didn't have a chance. They were very 
pleasant about it though, and one of them was kind 
enough to bring back a Times and a Saturday Eve- 
ning Post. 



August 21 st } 19 17. On Board the Transport 

Florence Luckenbach. 
Still opposite the 
Statue of Liberty. 

Things have gone from bad to worse. Even the 
old Statue of Liberty, which I was so glad to see two 
days ago, seems to look at me and say, "I'm liberty, 
all right, but you can't get near me." An immigrant 
couldn't feel as sore as I do if he were sent back to 
Europe. For there's nothing wrong with me; they 
don't need me so much that they couldn't do without 
me. It's simply that I signed up in St. Nazaire and 
now they can keep me as long as they want. They 
have been working two and a half days unloading 
the shells, and they are not through yet. A gang of 
longshoremen are doing the work and one of them 
to whom I gave a sandwich at lunch-time told me 
they were getting a dollar an hour for this overtime 
work. He said they made eight or ten dollars a day, 
on a good job like this. 

I don't know when we will get into Hoboken now. 
Yesterday the captain promised me Wednesday for 
sure, but now they say we must go into drydock in 
the Erie basin and have a new propeller put on. 

208 



"AMBULANCE 464" 209 

Sac a papier, this is terrible! My family is only 
sixty miles away, at Bayhead, N. J. I have not re- 
ceived an answer to my telegram yet and don't seem 
to be able to get in touch with them at all. 



August 23rd. On Board the Crazy "F. L" 

Drydock in the Erie Basin. 

I enjoy my work more now, with every new day 
that is added on to our little repose. The chamber- 
maid part is especially delightful. I tuck in the 
sheets any old way, just so the counterpane covers 
them, and roll all the pajamas up in a ball. I guess 
I won't get the promised tips, but I am so sore at the 
whole ship I can't sleep. "Bushracks," the ex- 
steward, has just heard of his brother-in-law's arrest 
and sentence to two years in jail for bribery in the 
draft exemption cases. So together we washed 
away our sorrow with a bowl of grapejuice and 
pineapple punch which we made secretly in the ice 
box. (We had borrowed the key unawares some 
time before.) Ed and I had cleaned it out care- 
fully several days ago and thrown away two hundred 
pounds of decayed meat. Of course, the place 
smells queer still; but the punch was excellent. 

They say we will be off the boat tomorrow. I 
don't know what this means. It was to be just 
one day more when we arrived here last Sunday, and 
now its the end of the fifth. Oh Job! Oh Job! I 
know just how you felt. 

210 



"AMBULANCE 464" 211 

The first treat I have had since we arrived came 
last night when I managed to get off the ship for a 
couple of hours and, through a telegram sent this 
morning, met Father at the Waldorf. And I not only 
did this, but I also called up Bayhead on the phone 
and talked with my Mother and some of the other 
members of the family for a minute. Father and 
I and an old friend of the family who happened to 
be at the hotel took dinner together. It was won- 
derful to see Father again, and I had so much to 
say about the trip all at once that I could only talk 
in disconnected sentences. The worst of it all was 
that I had to go back to the boat again at eleven 
o'clock. Even then my uniform created quite a lot 
of excitement in the subway. I hadn't intended 
wearing it at first, but a quick survey of my ward- 
robe showed that there was nothing else to do. 

This afternoon I managed to get off again for a 
little while. I saw my brother for a couple of hours 
before we separated at the Grand Central Station. 
He was leaving for Fort Niagara to enter the 
Officers' Training Camp there. 

My uniform helps just as much here as it did in 
London. I have no trouble at all going back and 
forth through the gates at the Basin. A dignified 
looking Russian major, thinking that I was a British 
officer, gave me a fine salute, which of course I re- 
turned in front of the hotel. 



August 24th, 19 1 7. On a Jersey Central train 

Going Home. 

My luck changed this morning just as Job's did 
one day several thousand years ago. We left the 
drydock when I was finishing my rooms and fifteen 
minutes later were passing the Statue of Liberty. 
Wasn't I happy when we were actually by her and 
heading straight for Hoboken ! We slid into the pier 
next to the Vaterland; and all of us waited in tense 
excitement for news from the captain and his pay- 
roll. But none came during the morning, so I got on 
my uniform, lowered all my luggage over the side by 
the jib crane, and saw about getting it through the 
customs before the captain returned. The new 
crew came on at noon and we didn't have to work 
at all. The payroll didn't come until four o'clock, 
but I got thirty-seven dollars and fifty cents out of 
it, which was worth waiting a few hours for. Then 
I said good-bye to all the crew and disappeared 
down the ladder. Five minutes later I got my last 
glimpse of the Luckenbach from the rear end of 
an old truck on which my baggage and I were bump- 
ing along over the cobble-stones to the Twenty-third 
street ferry. After I got over to Manhattan, I 

212 




i. The colt machine gun on the stern of the Luckenbach. 

2. Smith, the wireless operator and "Georgia" Jones, going ashore in the motor 
boat— messboys remain on board. Life-boats are lowered in this manner. 

3. Unloading one of our thirty ton guns. 

4. Practice with the three inch gun on the Luckenbach- 



"AMBULANCE 464" 213 

checked my luggage from the Jersey Central Sta- 
tion; and now I am on the train home. No more 
Luckenbach, only the family and a quiet time at 
the seashore for a few weeks. Princeton opens in 
September and I'll be there with the rest. But next 
fall it will be France again. 



FRENCH GLOSSARY 

Abri: a dugout, shelter from shell fire. 
Allemand: German. Allemagne: Germany. 
Arrive : a shell coming towards one from the enemy. 
Aspirant: a new officer, or one who is on trial; a candi- 
date or cadet. 
Aujourd'hui: today. 

Assis : men slightly wounded and able to sit up. 

Assez: enuf. 

Barrage (tir de) : gun fire which prohibits the movement 
of troops; curtain of fire. 

Beurre: butter; petit beurre, little crackers. 

Bidon : gourd, or canteen ; pail for water. 

Blesses: wounded. 

Bleu, Blanc et Rouge: Blue, white and red, the colors 
of the French flag. 

Boche : German. The word has come to mean thick-head. 
It was used to denote a person who butted into a game, or 
was the goat against whom everyone joined. 

Bois: forest or wood. 

Boulangerie: bakery. 

Boyau: a trench, usually a communication trench; orig- 
inally, a passage-way. 

Brancardier : a stretcher-bearer. 

Briquet: a cigarette lighter. 

Camion: a truck; camionette: a little truck. 
Camouflage: means used to render objects inconspicuous. 

215 



216 "AMBULANCE 464" 

Cantonnement: cantonment; quarters. 

Centime: monetary value, about one-fifth of a cent. The 

smallest coin used is the five centime piece. 
Chasseur (Alpin) : a soldier belonging to a famous 

French corps. 
Chateau : a country mansion, formerly the word meant 

castle. 
Chef: chief. 

Cognac : a kind of brandy. 
Couches: stretcher cases. Literally, men so badly wounded 

as to have to be carried lying down. 
Confiture: jam, or sweets. 
Coup de main: trench raid. 
Croix de Guerre: the War Cross, a French decoration. 

Departe : one of our own shells, on its way to the enemy. 
Douille: a brass shell case. 
Douze: Twelve. 
Drapeau : a flag. 

Eau-de-Vie: whiskey. 

Eclat: fragments of shells or grenades; shell splinters. 

Encore des blesses : still more wounded ! 

Epicerie : grocery store. 

Evacuation: transporting wounded to the rear; simply, 

moving of wounded. 
Essence: gasoline. 

Fatigue cap : pointed cloth cap worn by French. 

Feuille : the opposite of a marraine. The man with whom 

the girl corresponds. 
Fil-de-fer : barbed-wire. 



"AMBULANCE 464" 217 

Franc: coin worth about twenty cents. The standard of 

French money. 
Fromage: cheese. 
Fusee : a fuse, usually a time fuse. 

Genie (Soldats du-) : sappers and miners — engineers. 
G.B.D. : divisional stretcher company. 
Grands blesses: seriously wounded men. 
Guerre: war. 

Hors d'oeuvres: small appetizer, sardines, pickles, etc., 

served at the beginning of a meal. 
H.O.E. : evacuation hospital. 

Kilogramme : a measure of weight, a trifle over two pounds. 
Kilometre: a distance, about three fifths of a mile. 
Kilo: abbreviation used for either. 

Malade: sick. 

Marraine : literally, a god-mother ; used of a girl who sends 

letters and packages to some man at the front. 
Marseillaise: the French National anthem. 
Medecin-chef: medical officer in charge of the brancar- 

diers. 
Merci: thank you. 
Metro : Paris subway. 
Midis : men from the south of France. 
Mitrailleuse : machine-gun. 
Monsieur: Sir, or Mr. 

Obus: a shell. 

Opera-comique : the light opera; a theater in Paris. 
Ordre de mouvement: field orders to move, for troops or 
individuals. 



218 "AMBULANCE 464" 

Pain: bread. 

Patisserie: pastry. 

Permis de sejour: paper allowing one to stay in France. 

Permission: leave of absence. 

Pied gele: severe frostbite of the feet; frozen feet. 

Pigeon lamp: small gasoline torch. 

Poste de secours : first aid station. 

Pinard : slang expression for wine ; poor poilu wine. 

Poilu: literally "the hairy one." The French soldiers are 
given this nickname because they often go unshaven for 
long periods. 

P.G. (prisonnier de guerre ) : the abbreviation for pris- 
oner of war, which is stamped in huge letters on the backs 
of all captured soldiers. 

Premieres Lignes: first line trenches. 

Ravttaillement: supplies of all kind9 for the army, but 

usually food. 
Repos (en repos) : period of rest and inaction behind the 

lines. 
Rouge: red. 

Salle a manger: dining-room. 

Saucisse: sausage. French observation balloons are called 
sausages on account of their peculiar shape. 

Secours: help or aid. Poste de secours means a first aid 
station. 

Sejours: sojourn or visit, etc. — permis de sejours means the 
official paper allowing one to remain in France. This ap- 
plies, of course, to only foreigners. 

Soixante-quinze: 75. The famous 75 millimeter gun, 
about the same size as our three inch piece, is known sim- 
ply by the numeral 75, or soixante-quinze. 



"AMBULANCE 464" 219 

S.S.U.12 — Section Sanitaire (Etats) Unis 12: Trans- 
lated ft reads, "American Sanitary Section Number 12. 
The letter "U" is rather a poor abbreviation for the word 
American or United States, but "A" cannot be used since 
it stands for Anglais, meaning English. 

Soupe: simply the word soup. It has come to mean supper 
which usually begins with soup. 

Tir de barrage: Tir means the firing of a gun. Barrage 
means a barrier. The phrase therefore can be translated 
by the expression "curtain or barrier of fire." 

Tirage: meaning a drawing or dragging. A tirage at the 
front means a relay station or an intermediary post be- 
tween the advanced postes de secours and the hospitals. 

T. M.: Freely, transport of munitions. The truck sections 
of the Field Service were called T.M. Sections. 

Vin rouge : red wine. 



EXPRESSIONS IN FRENCH 

Eteignez les lumieres blanches: Literally, "Put out 
your white lights." 

Ou est la rue Cherbourg? Where is Cherbourg street? 
We were continually asking the inhabitants "Ou est" such 
and such a place. 

Gare du Quai d'Orsay: A railroad station in Paris 
called Quai d'Orsay. 

N'est ce pas. Is it not so? 

Cest la guerre. The Frenchman's excuse for everything. 
"It's the war," or "the war did it." 



220 "AMBULANCE 464" 



PLACES NEEDING EXPLANATION 

Esnes: The little village at the foot of Hill 304 in which 
our Poste de Secours was situated. 

Fontainebleau: A city south of Paris where the most im- 
portant artillery school in France is stationed. 

Strafen's Corner: (strafen means to punish). The bend 
on the Esnes road which the Boches shelled so regularly. 



Printed in the U. S. A. 



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tempted to doubt whether it is fiction at all — doubly wel- 
come and doubly important. ... It would be difficult in- 
deed to find a book in which the state of mind of the German 
people is pictured so cleverly, with so much understanding 
and convincing detail. . . . Intelligent, generous, sweet- 
natured, broadminded, quick to see and to appreciate all that 
is beautiful either in nature or in art, rejoicing humbly over 
her own great gift, endowed with a keen sense of humour, 
Christine's is a thoroughly wholesome and lovable character. 
But charming as Christine's personality and her literary style 
both are, the main value of the book lies in its admirably 
lucid analysis of the German mind." — New York Times. 

"Absolutely different from preceding books of the war. 
Its very freedom and girlishness of expression, its very sim- 
plicity and open-heartedness, prove the truth of its pictures." 
—New York World. 

"A luminous story of a sensitive and generous nature, the 
spontaneous expression of one spirited, affectionate, ardently 
ambitious, and blessed with a sense of humour." — Boston 
Herald. 

"The next time some sentimental old lady of either sex, 
who 'can't see why we have to send our boys abroad/ comes 
into your vision, and you know they are too unintelligent 
(they usually are) to understand a serious essay, try to trap 
them into reading 'Christine.' If you succeed we know it will 
do them good." — Town and Country. 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

Publishers 61-66 Fifth Avenue New Yorfc 



Victor Chapman s Letters 
from France 

Illustrated, $2.00 

Victor Chapman was studying architecture in Paris when 
the war broke out and at once he joined the French Foreign 
Legion. A year later he was transferred to the Aviation Corps 
and went to the front as pilot in the American Escadrille. 
This volume comprises his letters written to his family, cov- 
ering the full period of his service from September, 1914, to a 
few days before his death. "They are," says the New York 
Times in commenting on them, "graphic letters that show 
imaginative feeling and unusual faculty for literary expression 
and they are filled with details of his daily life and duties and 
reflect the keen satisfaction he was taking in his experiences. 
He knew many of those Americans who have won distinction, 
and some of them death, in the Legion and the Aviation 
Service, and there is frequent reference to one or another of 
them. ... In few of the memorials to those who have laid 
down their lives in this war is it possible to find quite such a 
sense of a life not only fulfilled but crowned by its sacrifice, 
notwithstanding its youthfulness, as one gets from this tribute 
to Victor Chapman." 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

Publishers 64-66 Fifth Avenue Hew York 



Inside the Russian Revolution 

By RHETA CHILDE DORR 

$1.50 

Here we have the truth, and the whole truth, as it 
has never before been written, about Russia and its 
revolution. It is, undoubtedly, the most important 
book of recent times on the country and the situation 
there. 

In the course of this remarkable work will be found 
interviews with many of the leading figures of the 
revolution — Kerensky and other ministers; Madame 
Viruboba, the Czarina's intriguing confidante; Botch- 
kareva, leader of the Battalion of Death; and with 
Prince Felix YussupofT, who himself describes in 
startling, vivid fashion how he killed Rasputin. 

The book is of enthralling interest, and everyone who 
is interested in Russia (and who is not just now?) 
should not fail to read it. 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

Publishers 64-66 Fifth Avenue New York 



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